I don’t know whom I felt more betrayed by—him or her. But that was silly. I was not a real person. I existed in two dimensions only. Love was for people who took up more space in the world. But even a stick man is capable of theater—better at it, even. He can hide in the shadows; he can disappear into the crevices of other people’s ambition and desire.
ELEVEN
CANDACE RIDGWAY LIVED ON A NARROW STREET IN Georgetown peopled mostly by retired diplomats and spies. Her house was a handsome three-story brick structure, with a wrought-iron staircase up to the front door and a postage-stamp garden in back. Inside, it was light and spare, with simple furniture that complemented the old floors and moldings. It was a house that could belong only to a single person—and probably only to a single woman. It was so neat, for one thing, and you couldn’t find a television anywhere. But more than that, it had the crisp orderliness of a woman’s home. The windows were clean, the drapes were pleated and hung just so, the rugs didn’t ruck in the middle. Each object was in its place for a reason.
Above the mantel was a nineteenth-century portrait of a handsome, fair-haired woman; she wore the high-collared blouse and severe hairstyle of the period, but the painter had captured the passion in her eyes and the high color in her cheeks. Candace had told me once that the woman in the painting was an ancestor, but it could not have been otherwise. On a table nearby rested a picture of her father and mother in happier times. The photograph captured the New England vision of romance, the two of them aboard a big Concordia yawl cruising off the Maine coast, tanned and windblown, the mother looking as if she was about to make a wisecrack and the father already smiling.
A fire was neatly laid in the fireplace, reminding visitors that the mistress of the house didn’t need a man to keep her warm. Set back from the hearth were a comfortable couch and two easy chairs. Over by the stairs was a well-stocked bar, signaling that the owner didn’t need a man to make her a drink, either. It was a congenial place to sit and talk. But it was obvious, too, that it was a lonely room, where an unmarried woman spent too many hours reading to herself.
I had called Candace the morning after the party. Overnight, my unhappiness had congealed into something hard and dry. I wasn’t hurt, I told myself; I was curious. Now that I knew a little bit, I wanted to know the rest. That would be my revenge, I had decided, that I would learn everything I could about them. Candace must have understood the intensity in my voice, because she invited me to come over that morning for Sunday brunch. It reassured me, I will admit, that she was at home. When I had departed Galvin’s fairyland the night before, I had wondered if Candace would ever leave. But here she was.
She came to the door dressed in white shorts and a yellow Lacoste shirt with one of those little crocodiles over the left breast. She was flushed; she had been in the garden, planting her fall annuals. She suggested we take some coffee out back and enjoy the morning sun before it got too hot. The garden displayed her sense of style and precision. The newly planted flowers formed a dazzling border, their tiny petals as bright as tropical fish.
“That was quite a party last night,” I said. “I hadn’t realized that you knew Galvin.”
“Nobody knew. I gather we made quite a spectacle of ourselves.”
I nodded. The September sun cast a delicate light on her face. There was something about it that reminded me of one of Renoir’s models—a freshness as if she had just stepped out of the bath. Perhaps that was why Galvin had staged his “bal au Moulin”—because he too saw her as one of the women in the painting.
“Tell me about you and Galvin. I concede it’s none of my business, but so what? That makes it more interesting. If it were my business, I’d already know it. But I don’t, so tell me the story.”
She looked at me, debating whether to answer. She wanted to talk about him, you could see that. She had unlocked something the night before, and now she wanted to let it run free. But it was a dangerous topic, too, in ways I could not then imagine.
“We’re talking ancient history here,” she said. “Does it still matter?”
Oh yes, I assured her. It mattered.
“We were friends in college, but it ended badly, and we sort of lost track of each other. When he arrived in Washington a few months ago, he asked me out, but I said no. Too much voltage still in the wire for it to be easy. But then everything got complicated. When people realized that he was trying to buy the newspaper, I decided not to tell anyone that we had been friends once. It felt awkward. Then he invited me to his party, and he asked me to dance, and there we were. And now everybody knows, or imagines, that we were lovers. Why do you want to hear about us, anyway? Is this healthy?”
“No. It’s sick. But indulge me. Either that, or you have to remain my fetish object forever.”
“How to tell you. . . .” She folded her hands and rested them against her lips. The words came eventually, like a flow of water through an old pipe.
CANDACE HAD ARRIVED AT Radcliffe in the fall of 1970. The world was coming apart that year; that was the first thing you had to understand, she said. It wasn’t like today. The kettle was boiling over, and crazy things were happening. Boys from fancy prep schools were running around talking about revolution and learning to shoot guns. They would take drugs and make up lyrics like “I’m dreaming of a white riot” to the tune of “White Christmas.” At the freshman mixers, under the stern portrait of A. Lawrence Lowell, people danced to “Street Fighting Man.” Nobody knew what was serious and what was a put-on. The smell of sex was in the air—messy and lubricious and wonderful.
She met Galvin one afternoon in the Yard, after class. It was a beautiful fall day. He was throwing a Frisbee. Candace was sitting on a bench in the sun, trying to read Max Weber. The Frisbee game ended, and he strode over and sat down next to her. She was ready to be interrupted. When he struck up a conversation—easy and unforced, a relaxed smile on his face—it didn’t seem like a pickup. He was two years older, a junior already. He called that night and asked her for a date. She should have been wary—upperclassmen were always hitting on Radcliffe freshmen, getting their names from a directory the boys called the “pig book.” But she wasn’t frightened of him. He had a gentle, playful manner, and a self-confidence that made him seem more like a man than a boy.
A few days later, they went to a lecture by Norman Mailer. A classic Harvard date. The Armies of the Night had recently been published, and Mailer was a god. But he showed up howling drunk. It was sad: He was sputtering and shouting at everybody. Candace tried to ask him a question about reportorial objectivity and subjectivity—she was so serious; she already knew she wanted to be a reporter. He took offense and started calling her “bitch” and “cunt,” but she mustered her courage and shouted back—saying that he was a pig and not a real journalist at all. People started booing him after that. It was an incredible scene. Galvin couldn’t stop smiling. He thought she was so cool—a freshman Cliffie, telling off Norman Mailer.
Afterward he took her to a seedy Irish bar, and they talked for a long time. She was still feeling the rush of getting into a shouting match with America’s most famous writer. Everything she said came out right, and he was laughing, introducing her to his friends, calling out to the waiter for more beer. He was handsome and smart—an impossibility; those two never went together. He walked her back to Cabot Hall and they made out on the bed in her room. He didn’t push it, the way a boy would have done. He waited for her to open to him—for her breasts to brush against his chest, her body to arch toward his. They didn’t “go all the way” that first night—she might have let him, but he didn’t push that, either.
They made love a week later. She told him to be gentle, because she was almost a virgin. He laughed and asked what that could possibly mean, and she explained that she had done it once, at the end of the summer with her high school boyfriend. He had been bugging her to put out for nearly a year, and she had finally given in, but it was a mess. He had come after about ten seconds, and he’d
been so embarrassed afterward, he could hardly talk. So in her mind, that didn’t really count. But Galvin knew what he was doing, and she remembered every moment—the feel of him, the lightness in her head, the weakness in her knees. The tenderness afterward.
This is what love is like, she told herself.
He asked her to call him Sandy, and explained that he was named after the poet Carl Sandburg. He described his father as a union official, but didn’t say too much else about him. In fact, he seemed a little embarrassed that he was from Pittsburgh. All he said at first was that he was from “western Pennsylvania.” How could he have known that it was a happy escape for her to spend time with someone who wasn’t from her world of privilege?
He wanted to know all about her father. Dwight Ridgway was modestly infamous on campus, as a former Pentagon official. The preppy leftists were calling him a war criminal, but Galvin wanted to know the real story. Perhaps he was measuring himself, sizing up the competition. Candace tried to explain what he had been like, before the war took its toll. It wasn’t easy; how do you describe the man who seems, in your memory, to have held up the sky? She was his only child, so he had channeled all of his aspirations into this one life. He wanted her to be beautiful and brave; forthright and cunning. He encouraged her to take risks, and was there to catch her if she fell. It was no accident, she said, that a child’s first word was usually “Dada,” rather than “Mama”—for fathers were the playful ones who encouraged you to try new things. But they were also the ones who went away.
In the last few years, her father had been ailing. It wasn’t discussed much at home, but Candace knew that something was wrong. He was tired; he was drinking too much; his spirit had been damaged in some way that she didn’t understand. He had gone off to a hospital the previous spring, for a long stretch that her mother never explained. There had been tears in his eyes in September, when he put her on the plane for college. She had never seen him cry before.
That fall at Harvard was like a house party that stretched on for months. Nobody did much work, the campus was still too crazy. Candace and her new boyfriend went with the turbid flow: They had sex all day and night, and they took drugs. A few years later, people became a tad more cautious. They just took normal drugs, like speed and cocaine. But in 1970, a young couple could still explore the whole medicine cabinet—pot, acid, mescaline, peyote. Candace tried mescaline with Galvin—she was the sort of person who had to try everything—and she wasn’t embarrassed, years later, to admit that she had loved it.
They would ingest the icky-tasting tablets in Galvin’s room in Adams House. In the beginning when it was intense, they would lie in bed listening to music and watching the wallpaper melt. Sandy might put a cool washcloth on her forehead, or just blow on her cheek. Little things felt like big things; it was as if the bandwidth of every nerve had been expanded, so it could carry more starbursts of information. They would make love sometimes—very weird, very intense; hallucinating while someone was inside you. Then they would walk down to the river, their eyes popping out of their heads—everyone must have known they were high—and lie down by the riverbank and watch the clouds turn into animals. That was how she knew she loved him, because she could lie there stoned—oozing and crackling—and still feel completely safe, because he was next to her.
That was what made Sandy Galvin different. The world around him was getting strange, full of holes, but he somehow stayed as hard as a concrete block. Even his hair was still short, the way it had been in high school. People thought he must be in the business school, he looked so straight. He kept playing sports, too—intramural boxing, lacrosse, and football until his sophomore year, when he broke his ankle. He was the only attractive man Candace knew who kept his head. The reason he took drugs, she suspected, was that he didn’t want to disconnect totally. It was so crazy back then. If you weren’t a little crazy yourself, you weren’t really there.
One weekend, they took a camping trip to the White Mountains. It was mid-October—almost Halloween. The leaves had turned, painting the New Hampshire hillsides scarlet and saffron, and it was getting chilly. They climbed for two or three hours to a high lake—ice blue, surrounded by tall fir trees that ringed the water. Sandy made a fire, and they put out sleeping bags and grilled some fish he had caught in the lake. They were so tired from hiking that they fell asleep after dinner and didn’t make love, but they awoke in the middle of the night. The fire had died down to embers, and the stars were so big and bright they seemed to be just beyond arm’s reach, and they made love then. Nothing ever felt so good. Sex and love, and a boundless sky. They fell asleep together in the same sleeping bag, their arms around each other—packed in so tight they couldn’t move.
When they awoke the next morning, Galvin asked her to marry him. She was shivering as he proposed. The temperature had dropped overnight. There was frost on the ground. He didn’t understand why she was crying.
Candace’s eyes filled with tears all over again as she recalled this part of the story. That crystalline fall morning had been the beginning of the bad times. She had pulled back as soon as he said it. It was crazy even to think about getting married. She was a college freshman; she had a father who was veering erratically toward mental illness; she had a boyfriend who worshipped her like the sun and the moon. It was too much. Her circuits were overloaded, and they began to shut down, for self-preservation. Sandy didn’t press her, but he never fully understood what had gone wrong that morning by the lake.
All that winter, she played the bluesy Joni Mitchell song “Urge for Going” on her stereo in Cabot Hall. It was about the anticipation of loss, the early frost that devours what’s left of summer and makes us ready to depart even as we hold on. She would sing along quietly, and Galvin would put his big arms around her and give her a hug. He didn’t understand, and she couldn’t tell him.
IT TOOK ANOTHER YEAR for the affair to end—it wasn’t until after her father was dead that they finally stopped seeing each other. I asked what had caused the final break, but Candace didn’t want to talk about it. Her eyes were red; she was exhausted. It had been hard enough to put herself back in Harvard Yard that freshman year, in the arms of the man she’d loved. She didn’t want to remember how it had felt when they parted. She went into her house, to be alone. How odd she had looked, I thought, when she was crying. Her lip had trembled, and all the muscles in her face seemed to go slack. The control had disappeared, but only for an instant.
She came back outside after a few minutes, apologizing. She had put herself back together—put the cap back on so quickly. I was sad to see it, for she had been quite lovely in those minutes when she had been lost in time, but I understood. She was sorry to have gotten so emotional—she never did that. She didn’t want me to get the wrong idea. She was still the Mistress of Fact. We talked awhile about the President’s troubles. She had a theory about his being the son of an alcoholic and needing to do bizarre things to get people to love him, but everyone was psychoanalyzing the President that week. It had become the national pastime, bigger even than baseball.
We ate some bagels and drank some more coffee. I told her I would be coming to work at the Sun—Galvin had decided to fire the Lifestyle editor and had offered me the job—and she seemed genuinely pleased.
“We’ll be together!” she said. That made me feel something close to happiness—the thought that I could slink over when I was in a particularly foul mood, gaze upon her unreachably beautiful body and goad her into saying something outrageous.
She wanted me to leave, but I still had to ask the question. That was why I had come, really, and it would have been unlike me to leave without trying to get an answer. I was at the door before the words finally formed on my lips.
“Are you still in love with him?” I asked.
She was startled. Her head bridled back for an instant. I knew by the look on her face that she hadn’t wanted to ask herself the question, much less answer it. “I don’t know,” she said.
TWELVE
THE DAY THE DEAL CLOSED, GALVIN MOVED INTO MR. Hazen’s old office. It was on the top floor of the building, with a view across Foggy Bottom to the Potomac River. When I answered his summons that morning, he was standing at the window, gazing at the line of rooftops abutting the hazy blue-gray sky. “Why is this city so flat?” he wanted to know. “It looks like someone took a knife and just cut it off. It’s unreal.” I explained about the height limit, which decreed that no building could be taller than the Capitol. But he was right, it did look unreal.
The plaque outside his door said SANDY GALVIN. He asked me to call him that, from now on. It seemed like a soft name for such a hard man, but he said he wanted everyone to address him that way. He was a newspaper publisher now; he could finally claim the legacy of his namesake, Mr. Sandburg. I suspected this was Candace’s doing. She must have thought it would make him seem less forbidding.
The new publisher didn’t waste any time. He called a senior staff meeting that first morning so that he could plot strategy with the vice presidents. Howard Bacon showed up, representing the news side; he looked better than at the party, but not much. A heavyset man strode in cracking jokes; he turned out to be the VP for advertising, Frank Moran. Also shuffling into the room were the heads of circulation, marketing, community relations and accounting. They were deferential to me, thinking I must be the big guy’s hatchet man. I think they all feared they were about to be fired.
Galvin assembled them on the couches and asked each to give a five-minute report on his department. He had spent the past few days studying all the available numbers—on circulation, ad revenues, newsprint costs, labor costs and projected profitability for the rest of the year. From the questions he asked, he already seemed to know nearly as much about the paper’s financial performance as his subordinates. When the vice presidents had finished, Galvin shook his head and said, “This isn’t good enough.” He told each of them to send him a memo by the next Monday with five good ideas for making the paper more profitable. Anyone who couldn’t think of five good ideas should resign.
The Sun King Page 10
