by Nell Zink
On one of her weekend visits to the new apartment, Pam reminded her that while, generally speaking, one can’t buy a career, one can, in fact, buy an education, assuming a generous mother with resources. “So now that you’re on TV, it’s a meritocracy?” Flora retorted. “You didn’t even finish high school! Your generation had it handed to you on a plate!”
It was hard for Pam to see how dropping out of public high school to work full-time constituted unearned luxury. She found Flora’s collegiate youth far more enviable. “I know what a résumé is,” she said, with reverse snobbery. “Some of my best employees have résumés.”
“But you never needed one. That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”
“Because I’ve been doing the same kind of work for the same guy since I was eighteen!”
“You just don’t get it. You don’t realize how privileged you were, randomly getting a great job for nothing.”
At that point, Pam cracked. Flora’s vastly overqualified dedication to her menial shit job, she said, was worse than idleness. Doing nothing could at least have been justified as some kind of a tourism project or a philosophical quest, but the shit job made her look complacent. Her gap year might kick off a long decline. “Please, baby, baby, please,” she begged. “Quit the stupid Sierra Club and the Greens. I didn’t pay for you to learn hard science for four years so you could go out and vegetate in the weeds!”
“I’m not vegetating. I’m learning how power is distributed in our society. It takes time.”
“But you don’t enjoy it. You’re not happy. It’s making me crazy.”
“I don’t want to throw my life away doing stuff because I enjoy it! Not when I’m working, at least. I want to leave the world a better place than when I found it.”
“And what do you enjoy? I don’t even know.”
Flora didn’t answer immediately, because she was sort of stumped. “Playing music?” she said. “But I don’t have time for that anymore.”
XIX.
In her capacity as chairperson of the local Green working group on climate change, Flora agreed to man an information desk at a quasi-academic conference at a hotel near the UDC campus from five to eight P.M. on a Wednesday. The non-Green speakers were junior staff from various local NGOs and academic departments, with friends who felt obliged to attend, so there were a good fifty people in the audience.
She fanned out her brochures on a table at the rear of the conference hall and dumped a Ziploc bag of antinuclear buttons into a stoneware soup tureen borrowed from the hotel kitchen. They looked forlorn and small. The ninth speaker tapped the microphone to reassure himself that he was being heard and said, “We need to understand and emphasize the urgency of what we’re facing. Global warming is the single most major challenge facing the human species today. We’re in danger of extinction. There need to be dramatic measures taken. It’s not going to be enough to resettle coastal populations. It’s not going to be enough to open our borders to climate refugees from all over the world. We have to recognize that our existence as a species is at stake. That’s how crucial this issue is.”
Flora felt embarrassed. She thought, This is not mitigation. This is not adaptation. This is not what I signed on for. This is not going to influence voters. And besides, it’s not even true.
She tuned out and stared at the right-hand wall. Scare tactics with climate refugees always reminded her of a seventh grade curricular unit on the Netsilik Eskimos of Pelly Bay. It was supposed to teach cultural relativism by dramatizing adaptation to a frozen world where seal eyeballs were a delicacy, but all she could think was how pissed off they must have been when they got TV. She didn’t think climate change was the reason people were leaving their homes. If somebody wanted to trade Mali for Ohio, it was fine with her.
An older white man approached the table. He picked up a brochure and opened it. He was dressed in a summer suit with his tie loosened—the only man in the room with a tie. She wondered whether he was some kind of spy from the opposition. She smiled and lifted the tureen of buttons to offer him one.
He declined and whispered, “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”
“Battling for humanity’s survival,” she said. “You should be listening closer.”
“Come on out to the bar with me. You shouldn’t be hanging around doing nothing like this while Rome burns.”
She frowned skeptically, but she stood up. Whoever he was, he was at the event, meaning he must have something to do with something. He looked more sensible and capable than most of the people in the room. He was mature and impressive, not boyish or harmless. He might be old enough to be her father, but the resemblance ended there. Daniel didn’t own a suit or dress shoes, and half the time he couldn’t find his belt. This man was a professional grown-up. He might be able to share some savoir faire with her, or at least buy her a drink.
She was not an amazing-looking girl. On this day her hair was not quite clean. But she was willowy, with good skin and small feet, which is always enough, as she knew. She picked up her purse, straightened her skirt, and walked with him out into the lobby.
There was a vestigial bar, not currently staffed. It didn’t look open. She offered to get them free refreshments from the speakers’ buffet in the green room. The stranger went instead to the reception desk and rang for service. The concierge emerged, manned the bar, and poured two ginger ales over ice at the stranger’s request. He introduced himself as Bull Gooch—his nickname since high school, short for Bolling, sorry. Flora said she was Flora and asked what he did.
“I’m here to get film of the guy who’s supposed to speak at six thirty.”
“You’re going to video Josh Fay? Did you get permission?” The question was patently standing in for another question. Campaigns sent trackers to monitor competing candidates all the time. The makers of surreptitious gotcha videos were nearly always innocent-looking kids.
Bull was not that, but he liked a subtext. He turned slightly, so that his gaze could take in the manifestly empty lobby, and said, “I don’t see a registration desk. It’s a public event.”
“But why?”
“Screen test.”
“I don’t believe you, because Josh Fay’s a dog.”
“You got a better-looking dog for me?”
“It took me one look to know you’re not a Green. You’re here to get Josh on camera saying something you can take out of context. I’m not letting you back in there. I’m going to call security.” She chugged her ginger ale.
“I admire your notions of democracy and an open society,” Bull said.
“My party has a soft underbelly,” she said. “It’s not my job to expose it.”
“Well said, but it’s not my job to accept that.”
“Who do you work for, anyway?”
“Myself.”
“As what?”
“Google me.”
She took her phone out of her purse, swiped and tapped, and said, “‘Gooch,’ let me see, I guess you spell that D-O-U-C-H—”
“It’s with a G.”
“I don’t see you in here. I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
He took a sip of his drink and said, “I feel we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot. Let me start again.”
“I have work to do.”
“I’m interested in Fay because I think Republicans are vulnerable on coal. There’s a lot more money coming to your typical Republican voter from fracking. Natural gas is relatively clean. Coal’s a baby-killer.”
“It’s the number one cause of global warming, historically.”
“Global what?” He looked around the lobby as if searching for an annoying buzzing fly. “Did somebody say ‘global’ something?”
“Warming.”
“You ever hear the term ‘NIMBY’?”
“Not in my backyard.”
“I like Fay because he’s anti-coal. It’s been a long time since I saw a coal mine in anybody’s backyard. It’s a case wh
ere maybe, just maybe, we can coax people to be critical of industry.”
“You expect to get anywhere with a negative message?”
“Politics is negative. That’s the problem with your warming issue. It’s not negative. How do you expect people to vote something down when you say it’s everywhere all the time? It’s intangible. You have to attack something people can beat. As in beat with a baseball bat.”
“I think we’re trying to give people a positive, sustainable vision for the future.”
“You ever read 1984? Positive is how people feel when you get them united in hate. Think about that when you go back inside. Is a positive vision the reason you all keep rambling on about human extinction all the time? People don’t care where their energy comes from. So start telling them coal pollutes the air. Run some ads with dingy laundry and kids coughing.”
“Umm, okay,” Flora said. “I should get back inside.”
“Donald Trump—you know him, the candidate for president?—he’s an idiot and a racist and a coal fanatic.”
“He has no chance of winning the nomination or anything else.”
“He will if I have anything to do with it. He’s going to drag the Tea Party movement back to the depths of hell from whence it came.”
Flora returned to her table. When the homely but articulate Josh Fay started speaking, Bull raised his smartphone high and filmed him. He didn’t make a secret of filming. At first Fay ignored the camera, but he kept sneaking glances at it, and after a while he was looking straight at it, addressing what he hoped was an online audience of thousands.
At the end of his speech, Bull waved the phone and smiled. On his way out, he stopped by Flora’s table and said, “I want to invite you to a private event on Friday in Georgetown.”
“A Trump fund-raiser?”
“An early dinner. What do you eat?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Sustainably sourced stuff like Greens eat. Milkweed pods and roadkill.” She didn’t mean to sound cold. Her parents’ sarcasm—suggested to her by his age—was gentled in her mind by its origins.
He gave her a card with his home address and said, “I’m relieved you’re not vegan. Give me time until seven. I’ll have to shop.”
WHEN FLORA GOT HOME, LATE THAT NIGHT, SHE TOOK THE CARD OUT OF HER BAG AND looked at it again. She thought, I am so definitely not going to dinner alone at this guy’s house, because he wants to hook up and he’s a million years old. Seeing his name in print reminded her of her pretended attempt to spell it, so she googled him. He didn’t have a personal home page or any business site that she could find. What he had was dozens, or maybe hundreds (she didn’t click through all the pages of search results), of newspaper and magazine articles calling him “top Democratic strategist Bull Gooch.” One article from 2010 said he was forty-two, which made him forty-seven. He’d been on the front lines in Florida in 2000. He knew the Clintons personally. There was a recent picture of him being buried in sand up to his neck by Richard Branson. You could see the feet of two women—or at least smooth feet and shins that presented as feminine—in the picture, looking as though they had stepped back for anonymity when the camera came out.
She tried some searches that might turn up whether he was single. She found a Washingtonian feature about “most eligible bachelors” from when she was fifteen. To her dismay, the picture made her think sexual thoughts. She felt like the ingénue falling for the experienced older guy in a Regency romance or The Flamethrowers. Yet she couldn’t see him in a dominant relationship role, being inconsiderate and mean. He would worship at her feet like Grady, because she would be so much more perfect than any woman he’d seen naked since before she was born, but he’d be potent like Ndu. It didn’t feel romantic, just hot.
She thought about looking for a boyfriend instead. It dispirited her to think of the hours she would invest in Bumble-swiping and coffee dates downtown to earn the right to invest in a relationship with some boy, when all she wanted was the temporary but undivided attention of a man she’d already met. She closed the laptop and went downstairs to help Ginger with dinner.
ON FRIDAY SHE RAISED THE KNOCKER OF THE TOWN HOUSE IN GEORGETOWN, CONSIDERING her outfit with satisfaction. She was wearing a semitransparent muslin blouse and faded baggy jeans. She hoped he might appreciate a 1970s look, being old and everything.
When the knocker fell, he opened the door. He said, “I was just heading out. It’s been crazy. I didn’t go shopping yet. You want to go with me, or would you rather just go someplace and get something to eat?”
“Have me in for a drink and I’ll think about it,” she said.
He opened the door wider. “Wise girl. Come on in. I live alone. There’s nobody here.” He opened the coat closet. “See? All my size.” He closed it again. “You like champagne?”
“Isn’t champagne as an aperitif awfully sixties?”
“I happen to have it lying around. There’s always something to celebrate in this line of work.”
“Can you do a Negroni?”
“I’m out of Campari. You want a Manhattan?”
She surveyed the living room while he made drinks. He had lots of books. There were no photographs on the walls, just prints and etchings of industrial things—old cranes and locomotives, a brick factory building labeled BETHLEHEM. There were fresh yellow and white tulips drooping from a big blue jar. It was tidy. It looked like the home of a rich guy with a cleaning lady. She sat down on the brown leather couch and opened a book of art photographs of the ruins of Kabul that was on the coffee table.
“Have you been to Kabul?” she asked.
“Once, about ten years ago,” he said, putting the drink in her hand. “When things were quieter in the north. A friend of mine collects old Mercedes sedans and heard it was a great place to find parts. He was right. God’s own junkyard.”
“It’s sad,” she said. “I always wanted to go to Afghanistan and Kashmir, but now I guess I never will.”
“The Soviets would have brought in socialism. By this time you could have been there in hot pants, with your hair down.”
“It always seemed to me like the most beautiful place. This one filmmaker I met at work told me there’s so much lapis lazuli in some of the mountains, they look blue.”
“It’s definitely easy to get opium and hash. Maybe he took a little too much.”
“So, backtracking here, are you a socialist?”
“Who isn’t?” he said. “It’s the wave of the future. We are the ninety-nine percent.” He raised his left fist.
“Those people aren’t socialists. They’re liberals who trust capitalism to give them a living wage and health care.”
“You ever read Howard Zinn?”
“In tenth grade.”
He went to a bookshelf and took down A People’s History of the United States. “I love this book,” he said. “And this is my favorite bit. It’s a quote from Eugene Debs.” He turned to page 339. “So this is the belle epoque socialist Debs talking, after Zinn’s just spent three hundred pages describing all the ways that standing up for workers’ rights can get you killed.
‘The members of a trades union should be taught . . . that the labor movement means more, infinitely more, than a paltry increase in wages and the strike necessary to secure it; that while it engages to do all that possibly can be done to better the working conditions of its members, its higher object is to overthrow the capitalist system of private ownership of the tools of labor, abolish wage-slavery and achieve the freedom of the whole working class and, in fact, of all mankind . . .’
“That’s socialism in a nutshell,” he added. “The frippery advertising claim that striking unions use when they’re selling their members a one percent wage hike over five years and a three-month moratorium on layoffs.”
“Paltry,” she assented. She drank from her Manhattan. “Every socialist I ever met thought it was the redistribution of wealth through taxes.”
“I never ask about doctrine,” he s
aid. “I look at what people do, not what they say.”
“Except don’t you do polling?”
“Polls are an interesting case, because they ask about beliefs, not actions. That’s why the only poll that’s never accurate is one that asks people whether they’re planning to vote. Sure, they want peace and justice, but do they care enough about it to run an errand on a Tuesday? I try to give them a stake in the process. Make them see how my candidate is money in their pocket. To keep my reputation for winning elections, I have to promise money into as many people’s pockets as possible. That’s as socialist as democracy ever gets.”
“It sounds so cynical.”
“It’s a temporary mood. Trust me, I can talk like a communist, especially after a night out with tech industry donors name-dropping ‘the Elders.’”
“What’s that?”
“This progressive club for has-beens of distinction.” He perched on the arm of the couch, lowered his voice to a stage whisper, and intoned solemnly, “‘We’re seeing a sustainability revolution. By the year 2020, no vehicle will burn fossil fuels. Airliners will be powered by the sun. World Cup soccer will replace war, as I was saying the other day in Saint-Tropez to Desmond Tutu.’”
“I saw a picture of you with Richard Branson.”
“Ah, a cyber-stalker!”
“I’m a digital native. It wasn’t the best picture. He was burying you in sand.”
“He just wanted my buffness out of sight. The guy’s sixty-five.”
They went for takeout from a fancy deli, brought it back to the house, and talked until eleven thirty.
He offered her cab money to get home. She took it. Getting out of Georgetown at night without a car involved either buses that didn’t always stop when you flagged them down—the drivers were happier alone—or bridges over Rock Creek where muggers should have been waiting for you, even if they weren’t, because those bridges would have been a great place to mug people.