D. C. Noir 2

by George Pelecanos

  A couple of times a month she’d give me a document or memcon—she’d picked up government slang, a “memcon” is a memorandum of conversation—and as a result of that I was a boon to Gottschault. Now he was paying me a hundred and twenty-five dollars a week, plus a thirty-dollar bonus for really important items. Items that were exclusive. Because of Nora’s tips, Gottschault had become very popular at the National Press Club bar. It was clear to everyone that he had inside information, “inside skinny,” as Nora called it. I enjoyed the extra money, but more than that I enjoyed Nora. I’d wait for her unannounced visits, when we’d sit and drink coffee or beer and talk. The longer she stayed in Washington, the more doubts she had about America; but she never regretted leaving London. Of course she was by then one of the best-known foreign correspondents in town. Her copy was nothing much to read because of the form in which she was obliged to write. The editor of her paper had a theory that no paragraph should be longer than two sentences, no sentence longer than ten words, and no word longer than three syllables. Once she wrote a two-hundred-word political story entirely in haiku, but her foreign desk mixed up the paragraphing so it came out wrong. But it was a noble effort, and (as a matter of fact) excellent haiku.

  It was partly Nora’s encouragement that gained me my first real sale, a story to the Saturday Evening Post for eight hundred dollars. I’d received word in the morning and immediately rang her up at her office. But she’d gone. I was agitated the rest of the day, because I wanted to share this news with her. I’d been working on fiction for two years and this was the first evidence I had that I could sell my stories for money. I felt wonderful and spent most of the day congratulating myself that I hadn’t “cheated” or “lowered my standards” or pandered to “the popular taste.” I had eight hundred dollars and virtue, too. At four in the afternoon, I heard the phonograph. Bunk Johnson.

  I opened the bedroom door right away and saw Nora sitting on the couch. It had taken me four months to write the story, Nora had followed it from the beginning. I trusted her absolutely, and now I looked at her and grinned and told her I’d sold the story and mentioned the amount. She knew everything about it, including how difficult the writing had been. I was certain that with this story behind me, I’d fly. “Nora, it’s really going to move now. The bastards can’t ignore me any longer,” I said, and scooped her up in my arms. She was so tiny and light it was like lifting a doll. She put her arms around my neck and kissed me on the cheek. She was crying, and I began to laugh.

  “Oh, come on. No tears. Think of this, a real sale. Money. I’ve the letter right here. They really like it. They’re thinking of putting my name on the cover of the magazine. Do you know how many copies they sell a week? Five or six million copies.” I held her tightly and laughed. “Every dentist in America reads the Saturday Evening Post.”

  When I put her down she was still crying. I started to say something funny, but understood then that the tears had nothing to do with me or the magazine. There was something frightening to me about Nora in tears, Nora hurt with no visible wounds. She cried without covering her eyes.

  * * *

  She stopped crying after a minute, and I went into the kitchen and made tea. She was sitting quietly in the middle of the sofa, a bleak look on her face, her hands in her lap, listening to Bunk Johnson. We had become very close over the six months, and I had a strong protective instinct toward her; it was partly fatherly, and strongly sexual. She had been the one encouraging me, and now I wanted to help her. I thought she was too strong to be hurt that badly by anyone.

  “Do you want to talk?”

  She shook her head.

  “Drink your tea,” I said.

  She held the cup in both hands, sipping the tea.

  “Trouble,” she said.

  “A man?”

  She nodded, yes.

  She was involved with someone, and I knew it was serious. She was the only woman in Washington who took sex seriously enough to be private about it. She had her own standards, which were uninhibited and seemed to me healthy; she said she loved the pleasure that sex gave her and never confused that with anything else. Beyond that, she was discreet. From time to time she stayed at my apartment, although we never slept together; different stars, wrong chemistry, she said. Those nights she was usually in flight from a bore or a sponge. She was cheerful about it, acknowledging that sometimes she picked the wrong man, and vice versa. But Nora’s life was not an open book.

  “Well, I’m a mess today.”

  I wanted desperately to say the right thing. She had always encouraged me when I needed encouragement, and I felt very much in her debt. I knew right away that this had something to do with her current liaison, the details of which I knew practically nothing.

  “You tell me what you want to tell me,” I said, as gently as I could.

  “I have to write a story this afternoon.”

  “Well, I’ll write the story. You tell me what it’s about, and I’ll write it. Then you can rest for a bit and tell me what you want to tell me later.”

  She smiled at that: “Friend, you can’t write a story for my paper. You don’t know how, your sentences are too long. Won’t work.”

  “I’ll cable London and tell them that you’ve got the flu.”

  “Would you do that?”

  “Of course.”

  “No need to cable, just call Judson.” Judson was the bureau chief, the man she worked for.

  I telephoned, Judson was out, so I left word with the answering service. Then I went to Nora, who was stretched out full-length on the couch. It took an hour to get the essentials out of her, but I still didn’t have the man’s name. It didn’t matter to me who he was, except from one or two things she said I gathered he was someone important. She told me the usual things, what he was like, what they talked about, how they’d met, what he meant to her, and how it was ended. It was “permanent,” she said, but ended. He wanted to get a divorce from his wife, and that was the last—definitely the last—thing she wanted. It would ruin his career, and he would be no good at anything else. She would become an ego doctor, and she wanted no part of that; she saw it as martyrdom and it seemed to her wrong. If you’re an architect or a lawyer and you get into trouble, you can resign and go practice somewhere else. If you’re a politician and get into trouble, that’s the end of it.

  “I can’t see him as anything else, and I don’t want to see him as anything else. I don’t care a hoot in hell,” she said. “Getting married doesn’t mean anything to me. It never did. I don’t care about it. He gets his … juice from politics. Politics and me. If politics goes, there’s only me. You know what happens then.” She shook her head. “It’s a disaster.”

  “Does he know the way you feel?”

  “Yes, and he says it doesn’t matter what I feel.”

  “Doesn’t matter?”

  “Yes, he says it matters to him. ‘The only way,’ he says. ‘The only decent way.’ Besides, he hates his wife.”

  “Oh.”

  “He says he doesn’t want to go on sleeping with me in motel rooms.” She smiled wanly. “Well, that’s rather sweet, really.”

  “I guess it is.”

  “The thing is, he’s really an awfully good politician. I mean … he’s really good. Damned good. You know?”

  “Look, Nora. Who is he?”

  “You don’t know?” She was incredulous.

  “How would I know?”

  “I thought everybody knew.”

  “Maybe everybody does. I don’t.”

  When she told me, I shook my head. I’d had no idea.

  * * *

  He was a midwestern senator, about forty, one of those who is always named on the lists of Most Effective Legislators, and for the last two elections as one of the many vice-presidential possibilities. As senators go in Washington, he had what the press calls high visibility. He was not a member of the leadership, but he had an independent base of his own, particularly among academics. He had been
a university president at twenty-eight and resigned to run for the Senate. That was a highly implausible sequence except that this particular university president’s father had been governor, and his brother now published the state’s largest newspaper. That was all I knew about him, except that he was a Washington politician who was clean. He was intelligent, he was not a thief, and he seemed to know his own mind.

  Nora stayed with me three days, she barely moved from the sofa. Her spirits improved, her confidence returned. In the mornings we drank coffee, in the afternoons tea, and in the evenings beer. She told me the story of the romance, how he had enchanted her …

  “I mean literally enchanted,” she said. Then she went on to list the things they did together, her tone of voice changing. She became wistful, a most un-Nora tone of voice. She talked of the future, too, how he’d plotted his political career, the plans he had for the next national convention; this was before he decided to divorce his wife. But she thought he had a self-destructive part of him, and that was not always unappealing, surrounded as he was by success.

  And not once in the first weeks did they ever speak of politics. They spent a weekend together in Nova Scotia, “and this was in December. Gosh, friend, did you ever spend a weekend in December in Nova Scotia? I was touched, he used my name to register at the hotel. Mr. and Mrs. N. Bryant. The way he did it, he was … oh, I don’t know what he was doing. I took it to mean he regarded us as equals. We spent that time in Nova Scotia, and other weekends in other wonderful places. Have you ever been to Chincoteague Island? And all the time he was legislating in the Senate, and passing me the documents, the bad ones, to get them out in the open.” She laughed. “He used to call me his publisher. He loved to see them all in print, then listen to the bitching and moaning inside the committee. The FBI was called in to investigate the leak. I thought it was all obvious, too obvious, so I passed some of the stuff on to you. Didn’t you ever wonder where it came from?”

  “Well, I thought you just picked it up …”

  “Friend, you don’t just ‘pick up’ the sort of stuff I was passing on to you. It was all golden.” She smiled proudly. “He loved it, really loved doing it, watching the reaction …”

  “The romance, Nora. It sounds to me a little heavy, it isn’t the sort of thing you pursue in motel rooms.”

  “But it is! Why not? It was just fine, it was going along just fine. Nothing wrong, he’d have to go home from time to time. But his wife didn’t really care. I mean he was under no pressure. Not from her. Not from me. Now it’s ended.”

  “Say again why.”

  “He’d be ruined without his political life. I know that. What do we do now? Does he open a law office, become a lobbyist? How about a beachcomber?”

  “My God, you can get a divorce and still run for office. A hell of a lot of guys do that. You can divorce, remarry, and run for office. There’s no law …”

  “You don’t understand. He’s a Catholic. He wants to marry me. You don’t recover from that. Not in his state. No, he’d have to give up politics altogether. Go do something else.”

  “You’ve talked it all out?”

  “Until I’m out of breath! He won’t listen. He wants to wait a year or two, then marry. He says he’s through with motels and through with his wife. But he doesn’t know what I know. Which is that without politics he’s a different man, and not as good a man. It’s the self-destructive part.”

  “Nora, someone isn’t defined entirely by what they do. People have other sides to them, sides that have nothing to do with … plumbing or writing or politics.”

  “Not him,” she said.

  “So you’ve refused absolutely to marry him.”

  She nodded slowly.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he was going to get the divorce anyway.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I’ll change my mind, he said.”

  * * *

  The next day Nora left, sad but in control. She was talking now about going back to England or cajoling her editor into a long assignment abroad, Africa or the Far East. She told me that she would never, never marry the man; it would destroy both their spirits, they’d be hypnotized for the rest of their lives by what he’d thrown away. She knew in her heart it was irretrievable. She said she understood the political mind too well not to understand that. If a man gives up power against his will it haunts him. And there was no need, she said. No need at all. Just before she left my apartment she made the only anti-American remark I’d ever heard from her. She generally regarded this country with great affection and enthusiasm, and it amused her to write pro-American articles for her Yankee-baiting London newspaper.

  “Goddamned American innocence,” she said. “Destructive virtue.”

  “Thank you, Graham Greene,” I replied. The remark irritated me, it was unjustified; it was true of course, but unjustified. “Can’t you see your man is in a bind, too?”

  “Well, we’re all in a bind. But he’s the one who’s forcing it, and there’s no need.”

  I couldn’t quarrel with that.

  * * *

  A week later, she called me for a favor. She said she would ask me the favor if I would cook her dinner. We ate a memorable meal, and she was full of praise for the Saturday Evening Post story and one other story I was working on. All the time she was talking, I was looking at her and wishing the stars and chemistry had been right. She was in good form, looking as beautiful as I’d ever seen her. She’d had another of her dinners at the White House and was full of new stories and phrases. She was pouring coffee when she said she needed the favor right away.

  “He’s coming over here tonight,” she said.

  “Great,” I said.

  “Just for an hour or two. It’s better to talk here, was what I thought. Not that there’s very much to talk about. Can you make yourself scarce?”

  I smiled at the Americanism. “Sure.”

  “He’s due in about ten minutes.”

  “I’ll go now.”

  “You can come back in an hour.”

  “I’ll make it an hour and a half.”

  “I appreciate it. Friend.”

  “Just keep the door closed, and I’ll know you’re still here if I get back too early.”

  So I left, half-angry, half-sad. There was a bar down the street that had a color television set. I hadn’t been in the bar in six weeks, but it was empty as usual and I took a seat at the far end, backed up against the wall, and drank draft beer for two hours. I thought I had better give them all the time they needed. While I sat and drank beer I thought about Nora and how she would handle it. It occurred to me that there were a hundred jobs in Washington that the senator could get, all of them close to the—what did they call it?—“the center of events.” There were jobs in this town other than elective ones. Editing newsletters. Influence peddling. I began to think of him as an undersecretary of state or an assistant secretary of defense. Depending, of course, on how messy the divorce was. Whether or not the press picked it up. Well. No adulterers in the Pentagon. But as I sat and drank the beer, I understood that the speculations didn’t matter. What mattered was Nora, and how she saw it. She’d staked out her territory and was a very determined woman. She loved him, so she understood him, and she understood Washington, too; that was the essence of it. It seemed to me that the way she had constructed her argument made retreat impossible.

  The night baseball game ended, and I was alone in the bar. The barman and I were watching the late news. There was film from Saigon and a report on the West Coast dock strike. We were chatting quietly, and then the barman moved off to serve a late arrival who had taken a table in the rear. I was preparing to go, when I caught the last of a sentence from the television announcer: “… the senator and his wife had been married for fourteen years.” There was no more, but I knew they were talking about Nora’s man. I turned to go and saw him then, at the table in the rear of the room, near the color television set. He was star
ing into his drink, a stricken look on his face. He hadn’t taken off his overcoat, its khaki collar concealed his cheeks and jaw. He was almost as big as I am, hunched over the table in the overcoat, his hat on the chair beside him. He stared at the drink and clicked the ice with his finger, apparently unconscious of the surroundings. I turned back to the bar and in a moment I left, leaving a five-dollar bill and walking straight out the door.

  I ran up the street to the brownstone, let myself in, and sprinted up the stairs to the second floor. The door was partly ajar, and I could hear Bunk Johnson’s blues inside. Nora was sitting on the couch, a drink in front of her, staring at the bookshelves.

  “He’s gone now,” she said. She waited a moment, concentrating, then went on. “He made an announcement tonight; he and his wife are separating. He prepared an announcement, a press release. He and his staff. Is that what you do in Washington? If you decide to get a divorce, leave someone’s bed, do you first prepare an announcement to give to the newspapers? Before you’ve packed, said good-bye?”

  “If you’re a senator, I guess you do.”

  “Television, too, I suppose.”

  “I guess so. I heard it on the news ten minutes ago.”

  “I suppose you’d want the largest possible distribution, no part of America ignorant of any personal fact. Do you suppose he’ll have a briefing for the wire services? Off the record? Deep background, perhaps. Lindley Rule with a release date?” She’d begun to cry.

  “Nora, Nora.”

  “No need,” she said.