Doxology

by Nell Zink

  IT WASN’T ENTIRELY CLEAR TO HER WHAT HE DID FOR A LIVING. HE HADN’T DISABUSED her of the notion that “strategist” was a job. When she inferred that he had the money to commission polls, he let it slide. He thought strategically. He avoided correcting people who overestimated him.

  What he did for a living was run a no-name, fly-by-night pop-up political ad agency that disappeared when overhead became a burden. It was never hard to find skilled three-month interns, and Washington was riddled with vacant offices. He would spend an election cycle sharing space with an antituberculosis organization or wild-eyed debt relief fanatics. When he stopped needing a place to put staff, he would retreat to his home.

  He had started out in the late eighties, interning with a famous ad man. The financials had begun simply and gotten simpler over time. There was more money in the system now and more markets to serve. The internet had created micro-niche TV. A production company could film the same image spot over and over, varying props and skin tones. The same actress could say she trusted your candidate with fake pearls and a dog, fake piercings and a cat, a fake handgun and an iguana. There were custom-made daydreams for every delusional style. Campaign advertising no longer had to be soft-focus. The blurriness appeared when you thought about it.

  Nonetheless, he was struggling professionally, not sure what his next step would be. His product was expertise. That used to mean an expert’s spontaneous gut feeling. The big man in the room sized up situations and made pronouncements, and his authority made him heard and obeyed. That system had died out in Democratic circles. It wasn’t only dead. It was under belated attack every time he opened his mouth. He had to justify himself to every potential client and even his own interns. Everybody wanted chapter-and-verse explications of decisions he habitually based on surefootedness, delicacy, taste, and long experience. The youth of today were strenuous, he believed. He liked that Flora seemed old-fashioned, as evidenced by her willingness to accept taxi fare.

  HE CALLED HER THE NEXT MORNING TO ASK IF SHE WANTED TO SPEND SUNDAY AFTERNOON at the Great Falls of the Potomac. She said yes and asked him to pick her up at the Cleveland Park Metro stop out on Connecticut Avenue.

  On Sunday she dressed outdoorsy by putting on a fitted blouse, peacoat, and jeans. She didn’t own any fleece or hiking boots. He drove to the Virginia side of the falls. He was overdressed too, in a silk scarf and merino sweater. They strolled well-worn trails, talked about politics, and watched kayakers ride the chutes. They hit a diner on the way home for club sandwiches. She got the impression he wasn’t aware of their age or sex difference. He treated her as an equal. He even acted like one, slinging radical arguments out of left field like one of those professed socialist students at GW.

  At dinner on Wednesday in an opulent restaurant (she got the feeling he really liked her), they got to talking about personal things. He finally explained his work as an independent media consultant. He described himself as running a branding and marketing agency that takes its funding from super PACs. He said he was a stringer, a freelancer, as were his staff members. Currently there was a Senate campaign that had him on retainer, but discreetly. The work had ups and downs. It was highly seasonal. It ramped up to full-time chaos in the months before elections and dwindled down to nonstop social obligations in the years between. The lulls got shorter with every passing cycle. He’d never found time to have a family.

  That was intriguing information for Flora, because a man like him could easily have two or three grown-up kids, or resentful children he never made time for, mothered by an angry ex-wife. But he’d never been married. They had already shared one bottle of wine and were well into the second. She said, with her denatured parental irony, “I guess I’m just your typical cliché ecological justice warrior, saving the symbolic planet like I think there’s somebody watching who’s going to promote me to a job saving the real one.”

  “I take it you’re on antidepressants,” he responded. She shook her head no, and he said, “Well, then you must have some happy future plan that keeps you going, because you’re obviously not that woman. I’ve met that woman ten thousand times, and you’re not her.”

  Flattered, she confessed that her escape fantasy—amusing because it was incompatible with everything she believed in—was to be a young mother, as her own mother had been. But not in a city. She wanted to live in a cabin in western Maryland, in this valley she’d seen once on a car trip. In real life, having children was something she’d be able to do when she retired, which was kind of funny, since she’d basically been raised by her grandparents.

  That coda evoked his fullest sympathies. As a professional Democrat in Washington, he was in regular contact with communities where being raised by grandparents was the gold standard. He imagined her father abandoning her mother—that would explain her willingness to go on dates with a man almost twenty-five years older—who would have held down two full-time jobs, with the grandmother to pick up the pieces of Flora. He nodded and said, “You turned out pretty well, all things considered.”

  “I didn’t grow up on the mean streets!” she protested, sensing his misapprehension. “My grandparents live in Cleveland Park. I went to Cathedral and played the violin.”

  He felt himself getting a serious crush on her. He’d never met an upper-middle-class girl so unassuming. He said, “Well, I think you’re legit.”

  SHE DIDN’T SAY HER PARENTS WERE ROCK MUSICIANS IN NEW YORK, MUCH LESS THAT before moving in with her grandparents she had spent a lot of time with Joe Harris. She had nothing to gain by mentioning him. “Bird in God’s Garden” had become a touchstone for white people who were teenagers when he died. Gwen—bereaved in a time before interactive online haters—was seen as the angelic keeper of his flame. Bull might lose interest in her and ask questions about Joe or Gwen. His view of Joe might be critical. He might be too old to ever have heard of either of them. There was no potential upside.

  She didn’t even say where she was born, much less that she’d spent nine years on Chrystie Street and fled on 9/11. He didn’t ask. He seemed to file her in the drawer where he kept legit local girls, and she liked it there.

  HE DIDN’T TELL HER HE WANTED HER. TWENTY YEARS EARLIER, OR EVEN TEN, HE WOULD have swooped in on the first date, seducing her with all due haste. But he felt a mild anxiety—truly quite mild—regarding rejection. It slowed his tactical approach. His sex drive was no longer so strong as to give him no peace. He could kiss her goodbye after a date and watch her walk away without discomfort. He believed he could maintain the catlike stalking approach through at least date number six or seven.

  He was enjoying getting to know her, and he sensed that his feelings were reciprocated. Every additional quantum of affection lowered the risk that when she saw the ravages of time on his body, she would hightail it for the Metro. He wasn’t overweight, or barely. His hair was thinning only at the crown, and little of it was gray. But there comes a time in any person’s life when the alternative to skin and bones is flab, and he had reached that stage. The body parts that weren’t amenable to weight training were soft. Not his dick, thank God. But his face, his neck, the tops of his thighs. On him the firm plumpness of youthful fat was no longer to be found. He was lean or he was nothing.

  He liked that she lived with family. Most girls like her lived in group houses and would want to run him past their roommates. He didn’t like liaising with dates on their turf. He was a big guy, two hundred pounds at his skinniest, with a trick knee from college lacrosse. The girls’ rickety chairs would wobble. Their skunky beer would turn his stomach. Their sprung sofas would give under the weight of his hands as he lurched to his feet.

  Notably, he didn’t tell her he was infertile. She had made a big deal about wanting kids. His spermatozoa were sad specimens, few in number and low in morale. He’d found out in college, when his fraternity organized a sperm-donating road trip to raise money for a keg party. The nurse told him he wouldn’t be getting paid. She popped some of his ejaculate onto a mi
croscope slide to show him. It was like hunting white rhino from an airplane. A sucker’s game.

  By the same token—sperm donation being a thing—he could have had oodles of children whenever he wanted. There was always some woman in love with him. Until recently, his pursuers had been of prime reproductive age. Now that they were thirty-five and up, he had become the pursuer. He focused on recent college grads so as not to waste any thirtyish woman’s irreplaceable time. He was childless because he’d made up his mind. He knew what he wanted out of life: freedom for all, including himself. He had a brother in Japan with two kids who claimed to envy him. That was reassurance enough. He told most women he’d had a vasectomy, to make things perfectly clear.

  He disliked condoms and never used them. On paper, it was a crazy risk. The HIV infection rate in D.C. was 5 percent. But that one person in twenty wasn’t a Mount Holyoke grad interning in a senator’s office, as a rule. You couldn’t have paid him enough to pick up a sexually adventurous woman in a bar.

  Almost none of his lovers had been on the Pill. He wasn’t sure which came first, the chicken (the Pill) or the egg (the ten pounds a woman gains when she goes on the Pill), but somehow he always went for women who lacked both. They were pleased to hear he was infertile.

  Flora was different. He wasn’t in a rush to shop for donor sperm and install her in that cabin near Hagerstown. Besides, he preferred eastern Maryland, where he could moor a boat and there was golf. But he didn’t want to lose her either, by elaborating prematurely on the ways in which he wasn’t dad material.

  He hadn’t lied; most of his life, he’d been too busy to be any kind of father. But business was slowing down. It was true he worked on Senate campaigns, but ten and twenty years before, he had worked on presidential campaigns. He was struggling to get Clinton’s people to return his calls. He wasn’t a radical, but he had a reputation for being on the Left, earned back in the days when the Right was run by openly racist supply-siders intent on shrinking government until it drowned in the bathtub. He assumed those days would never come again. The Obama years—particularly the health insurance mandate—had drawn educated young people so far leftward that they expected a guy like Bull, with a legacy lefty reputation, to be a socialist. He couldn’t win points with them by saying he wasn’t. They presumed him incapable of comprehending social media. They didn’t want to hear about prime-time TV, aging party bigwigs, or the stodgy oldsters who donate the money and do all the voting. They believed knowledge was power, as if the world weren’t run by ignorant fools. They expected him to be an insider, as if any politician bound by the chains of office would talk to a guy like him.

  In short, he was still rich enough, but struggling to find a way forward. For all he knew, the way forward was early retirement with sperm-donor kids. It could happen.

  XX.

  The current woman in love with Bull was named Jennifer Wang. She was several years older, and her femaleness had never struck him with any particular force. She’d been forty-six when they met, and before she turned fifty, she cut off her hair. Her voice turned brassy, or she pitched it lower—he wasn’t sure—but she sounded like Umm Kulthum. She wore stiff black clothes and round glasses with red frames, an eye-catching look designed to make her fade into the background.

  After a number of upsetting offers from men who were much younger or much older, she had abandoned sexual relations in favor of chaste devotion to Bull. He preferred to maximize gender contrast, because his infertility put his masculinity in doubt. She was never in the running. Her career was taking off—she worked in radio, where looks mattered less than authority—while her hopes of marrying him declined to where her chances had been from the start. She served as his gratis public relations bureau at National Public Radio, always ready to spread quotes, rumors, and memes. In return she got access to the puny nonpareils of information he was obliged to sprinkle over his sweet, creamy mythmaking. That is, their relationship was a one-way street, and she needed to move on and get a crush on someone else, but she wasn’t there yet.

  He made a date to meet her at an art opening in lower Northeast, near Gallaudet. He arrived late, after the speeches. He grabbed a glass of red wine, followed her to an empty corner where a white porcelain cherub was copulating with a polyurethane tomato hornworm, and told her, “I have news. I’m in love.”

  “That’s great!” she lied. “Finally going to tie the knot? Who is she?”

  “Nobody you know. Intern or something.”

  Jennifer sighed. “Bull, you’re making a mistake.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding. She’s a physically perfect, healthy, beautiful, entertaining young woman, and she finds me sexually attractive. How can that be a mistake? In what unjust universe is that a mistake? Just letting you know I’m having a happy phase, so if you want to take advantage of me, now’s the time. Professionally, I mean.”

  “Tell me about Radzio. What’s up with Radzio?”

  Pupie Radzio was a candidate for district attorney, a lawyer in private practice, and a hard-right Republican from the Libertarian wing, running in the Democratic primary because Republicans didn’t stand a chance in general elections in D.C. He believed in fostering the exercise of personal liberty to the maximum extent allowed by a conservative interpretation of the law and in locking up wrongdoers and throwing away the key. He was polling alarmingly well after coming out in favor of marijuana decriminalization, which had already been enacted into law. The other candidates, confused, were ignoring him. Defending legal marijuana would have made them look a tad obsessive, as though all the weed they were smoking made them unable to forget about weed. Plus you couldn’t attack him without saying “Pupie,” with the U sound of “put” or “foot,” and “Radzio” as “radge-oh.” To run him down properly in the age of search terms, you had to spell his name aloud.

  “Major headache,” Bull said. “But he has an Achilles’ heel.”

  “Do tell.”

  “He defended the Flea Collar Mom. You don’t remember? Neighbor of mine in Georgetown who put a flea collar on a newborn baby, so when the kid’s two months old she takes her in for her MMR or DDT or something and the thing’s pretty much part of her neck.”

  “That can’t be true.”

  “Radzio’s defense was that she had a right to raise her kid any way she wanted. Said it was ironic to prosecute her when abortion was legal. This was in maybe 1979. He lost and they gave her twenty-five years.”

  “That’s fucking disturbing.”

  “He got out of criminal defense into estate law for a while. This is definitely the man to put our great city back on track.”

  “The Flea Collar Mom. How come I never heard of this?”

  “Because you canceled your LexisNexis subscription when you got Google.”

  “So where’s your intern? Is she here?”

  “Her name’s Flora.”

  “What a pretty name!”

  “A pretty name for a pretty girl, currently manning a table on a sidewalk in Old Town Alexandria. She volunteers for the Greens.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “She was raised ambitious, from a competitive background. I think she’s looking for an opportunity to crash and burn.”

  “It’s important to learn early in life how that feels.”

  “You couldn’t be righter. Most people’s first impulse is to join the winning team. Flora already darkly suspects that the bad guys are in charge. I like that in a woman.”

  “Nice guys finish last.”

  He clapped his hand onto her shoulder, a moment of contact to reward the double entendre, and said, “So what else is new?”

  “Tell me what you want to hear.”

  “Well, let me see. Hillary pulled out of the race and endorsed a three-term Colorado governor who’s white, moderate, and fifty-six. His name is—um—Charles Dexter. Former firefighter, made his money as a brain surgeon. Elk hunter. Married for thirty years to a gorgeous Vietnamese American girl who has a chain of craft shops. Bri
lliant, beautiful kids. One of them’s on the Olympic downhill ski team.”

  “Boy or girl?”

  “Girl. And you should see this guy’s face. George Clooney meets Hugh Grant. You know that German guy who works for the pope? That’s who he looks like.”

  “Oh, yeah?” She pulled out her phone and said, after a brief pause, “George Gänswein.”

  “That’s ‘Gay-org.’ The younger Georg Gänswein. But his friends call him Dex.”

  “This guy could win,” Jennifer said.

  “He’s an unstoppable fighter, a master of trade law, committed to education, passionate about preparing our youth to make the twenty-first century an American century, but always over a beer. There is no man on earth you would rather drink a beer with.” Bull put his empty wineglass down on a pedestal and said, “Let’s get dinner before I get in too deep.”

  “Is he tough on crime?”

  “His college fiancée was raped and murdered by the unemployed. He knows what it means to suffer.”

  “Is he a good businessman?”

  “You bet! He patented a way to turn spent nuclear fuel into gold.”

  “There’s a painting here you need to see,” she said.

  She touched his hand, and he followed her into the next room. He moved slowly, nodding at two former employees and shaking hands with a city council member whose campaign he’d run years before. Finally he and Jennifer were standing in front of the painting she liked. It depicted a disconsolate Godzilla seated at a dining table with tears in its eyes, staring openmouthed at a birthday cake. “I don’t get it,” he said.

  “He breathes fire, so he can’t blow out the candles and get his wish.”

  “I mean, I don’t get why it reminds you of me.”

  “I didn’t say that! It reminds me of Hillary.”

  Bull laughed, a bit nervously, and said, “I need dinner. Let’s go.”