One member of the brethren made clear, after his first theater review for the Crimson, that someday he would be the drama critic of The New York Times, and a few years later he actually was. It wasn’t even surprising; the shock would have been if he had failed. An aspiring film critic got so upset when a classmate criticized his review of a Sam Peckinpah film that he punched him in the nose, literally; he now reviewed films for The New Yorker and Salon. A third vastly talented man had edited three of America’s leading magazines by the time he was forty. He was famous, in our set, for the aphorism “No matter where you go, there you are.” A long-haired radical who liked to write essays about Trotsky had become one of the nation’s leading business editors and a courtier to the wealthy and powerful. What a gallery!
But I had hidden away, wrapped myself up into a tight and inconsequential ball of failure and been quite happy with it all these years. Nobody had ever written the editor of Reveal to say what an interesting cover story we had on Washington’s hottest Zip Codes (20016, 20007 and 20854, if you missed that issue). Failure had been my security blanket; it had given me an excuse for the paucity of the rest of my life.
But I had an unpleasant feeling that success had been lying dormant within me too, all these years—like a virus. It was multiplying and taking root. Next it would demand that I make friends, form relationships, have a real life.
I was stronger than that, I told myself. I could fight off the pox a bit longer. To stay healthy, I would stop opening those flattering letters from my classmates.
FIFTEEN
THE LONG INDIAN SUMMER FINALLY ENDED IN LATE October. The bees disappeared to wherever bees go, and a wintry mist hung in the air. The leaves were falling in wet clumps. Driving up the parkway to Galvin’s house, I could see the river and the cityscape beyond, through the bare branches of the trees. It was a cold, unflattering vista. Washington imagines itself in green, living in a perpetual summer; if you fly over the city in mid-July, its neighborhoods seem to disappear under a leafy canopy. But the city loses that camouflage with the coming of fall. The potholes, the peeling paint, the untidy public spaces all become visible. That is the essence of Washington’s self-delusion—that the shabbiness of winter always comes as a surprise.
I made my way down Galvin’s driveway. I was curious about this celebration. What had our titan prepared for us? He was moving so fast these days, but the rest of the world was slowing down. He was out of phase. I wondered if he knew it. At the bottom of the drive, his oversize house came into view; I could see late-flowering pansies blooming in neatly laid flower beds. That should be his motto, I thought: Always in bloom.
From somewhere to the left of the house came the thwack! thwack! of tennis balls. I followed the sound until I came to a rustic stone wall draped with ivy and clematis. This stone amphitheater had been constructed a few months before, in place of the usual chain-link fence, to enclose the tennis court. The court itself was Har-Tru, swept and rolled each day by one of the gardeners, with lights for night play as bright as those at the ballpark.
Galvin was rallying with Candace. She seemed to be the only other close friend who had been invited to the celebration. Otherwise, except for the servants, the place was empty. She was dressed in loose-fitting cotton shorts and a baggy sweatshirt, so that all you saw were legs and arms and hair. She was a surprisingly good player: Her strokes whispered lessons at the club and Sunday afternoon games with her father. She hit a two-handed backhand, with as clean and powerful a motion as a woodsman felling a tree. Galvin chased back and forth after her shots. He was dressed in a black T-shirt and blue gym shorts—the outfit he probably wore when he lifted weights before work. It was a mismatch. She was a far better player than he; all his strength was a useless encumbrance. He stumbled once, going after a crosscourt forehand. He got up slowly, and there was a look of surprise and sudden fatigue on his face—how could this be? But when Candace ran toward him, he laughed it off.
I sat down in the pavilion that overlooked the court. Galvin called out for me to grab a racket and come take his place, but I begged off. I didn’t play tennis, and even if I did, I would have said no. I had the feeling that I was watching a sublimated act of sex. The more points he lost, the giddier he became—screaming at her that she was cheating, that it was all just luck. They came off the court eventually, flushed and sweating, and flopped into two chairs. Candace drank a glass of Gatorade and made jokes about how bad Galvin was, and then excused herself to go take a shower.
“Why did you invite me?” I asked Galvin when we were alone. It was obvious that I was redundant.
“She wouldn’t come without you, old boy. You’re my excuse.”
“Well, I’m leaving. You don’t need an excuse anymore. This is embarrassing.”
“Stay!” he implored. “We have a lot to talk about. And there’s the celebration.”
He went off to shower. I stayed a few minutes more by the court. A big yellow Labrador retriever lumbered over with a tennis ball in his mouth and dropped it at my feet. I threw it as far as I could, and he loyally brought it back, dropping it at my feet again. This time I got up and walked away. He followed with the ball, and we walked back toward the house, the dog and I, ambling along the stone path toward the swimming pool. The dog’s pace quickened as we neared the pool, which shimmered before us, milky white, under a halo cast by the underwater lights.
The dog dropped the ball again. I threw it into the pool, and he leaped in after it—making a big splash as his golden fur hit the illuminated water. He swam with amazing dexterity toward the yellow ball, clenched it in his teeth and paddled back toward me, dropping it by the edge of the pool. He wanted me to throw it again, but I thought it should be my turn—he should throw it to me this time—but that wasn’t going to happen. The dog emerged from the pool and shook off several gallons of water in my direction as we shambled off together toward the house. I couldn’t complain; he was my date.
GALVIN HAD LIT A fire in the study. He and Candace seemed relieved when the dog and I arrived. I was the beard, the easy way for Candace to reassure herself that this wasn’t a private encounter. She had changed into a pair of black jeans and a loose top, with a sweater thrown over her shoulders; her hair was up, but wisps of it were falling out of place. Nobody was talking. There was a silky, sparky feeling of sexual tension in the room—as if all the circuits had been wired through our adrenal glands. Even the fire was popping in the hearth—little explosions of light and color as pieces of bark caught flame.
“What shall we have to drink, eh?” asked Galvin. He was nervous. I could hear it in his voice. “Should we open a bottle of wine?”
Candace said that would be fine. I didn’t answer because I wasn’t sure my view really counted. But Galvin turned to me solicitously. “Come downstairs with us to the cellar, and we’ll pick it out together.” He still needed me as a foil, to preserve the illusion that this was a group endeavor.
We followed him down the hall, past a large metal safe, to a doorway that led down to a room with glass doors and elaborate temperature controls. Galvin deactivated an alarm and unlocked the door. Inside, it was as cool as a refrigerator. He flipped a light switch, illuminating the wine bottles that were racked floor to ceiling along three walls. It was like a little art gallery: Each bottle had a white plastic tag, identifying the name of the wine and its vintage—and below that the year when it would be ready to drink. I didn’t know much about wines, but I couldn’t help recognizing the famous names along Galvin’s wall: Léoville-Las-Cases, Le Corton, Montrachet, Romanée-Conti; row after row, vintage after vintage.
“It’s so perfect,” said Candace. She seemed surprised. This was the clearest physical evidence she had seen of Galvin’s wealth. What appeared to fascinate her, though, was less the opulence than the sheer order and precision of it, like a collection of stamps or butterflies.
“This is an interesting one,” said Galvin, taking an old bottle off the shelf and blowing away the dust so we could
see the label. It was a 1945 Mouton-Rothschild—the first vintage after the war, with a little V for victory at the top of the label. He handed it to Candace. She held the 1945 Bordeaux in her hand, and then a 1900 bottle of Madeira, then a 1926 magnum of champagne. She hefted each one, held it up to the light to assay the color and study the label.
“Where did you get them?” she asked.
“I have a man in New York. When he finds interesting things coming on the market, he buys them for me. I started buying wine in Hong Kong. Japanese clients liked the fancy names. They would throw business my way for a glass of Nuits-St.-Georges.”
“How much did all this cost?” I asked. That was the crass question, so inevitably I had to pose it.
“I don’t know. I’ve bought it in little bits over a long period. I suppose there must be close to a million dollars’ worth of wine in this room. Hard to say; you’d have to auction it off, to be sure what it’s worth.”
“Will you ever sell it?” That wasn’t simply another of my vulgar questions. I was curious. Would a man hold on to his wines, even if he was in danger of losing one of his houses?
He looked at me with disappointment. How could I imagine such a thing? This was an investment in good living.
“I intend to drink every bottle, with help from my friends.” He smiled at both of us, but his eyes lingered on Candace. She was still scanning the racks of bottles. He moved toward her.
“I’m happy you’re here,” he said. “I’ve wanted to show this to you for years. I wanted to know what you’d say when you saw it.”
She took his hand and gave it a little squeeze. “That’s sweet.” She kissed him on the cheek. She obviously didn’t know what to do. The evening was already slipping across the mental boundary she had established in her mind.
“So what shall we drink?” Galvin surveyed the shelves that contained his prize Burgundies and selected a 1990 Batard-Montrachet and a 1985 La Tâche. He held the bottles so that Candace could examine the labels.
“Just right,” she said. Like all good ex-foreign correspondents, she knew her wines.
Galvin seated us in what he called the “small dining room,” which I had never seen before. It was a circular room, painted a deep red, with a handsome round table in the middle. Candace sat between me and our host. On the walls were three Matisse etchings: a nude lying on a rug; another woman clothed, gazing at a fishbowl; a third woman lying facedown, her eyes peering out provocatively above her folded arms. They were simple drawings, a few nimble lines capturing the freshness and sensuality of the artist’s model. They all looked like Candace, it suddenly occurred to me.
Our host was ebullient, glowing with the wine and his inner spark, and I kept wondering whether something specific had happened, or if it was just his pleasure at having Candace with him. The food arrived—a cold seafood salad, followed by lamb chops—served by a pretty French girl who was married to Galvin’s chef. “The staff,” he liked to call them—all these people underfoot, fed by a hidden river of cash that quite obviously continued to flow, whatever troubles might lie over the horizon.
We finished the white Burgundy and were rolling through the red. Galvin and Candace were talking animatedly, remembering something from their golden youth. It was a train trip, I gathered, taken across the western United States in the summer of 1971, the summer after they met. They had run out of money in Wyoming—no! It was Salt Lake City!—and they had decided to hop a ride on a freight train. Galvin had read an article about how to do it. It was a canned-goods car, remember? They were finishing each other’s sentences, racing to the next part of the story, the way a couple will do.
Candace turned to me, her eyes as bright as they must have been that day rumbling out of Salt Lake City. They sat with their feet dangling over the edge of the boxcar, she remembered. The sun had been setting over the Great Salt Lake, shimmering orange and gold in the desert heat. The hobos on the boxcar began to drink and sing train songs. One of them got so drunk he fell off in Elko, Nevada.
Galvin stirred at the memory. “ ‘They call me Hoppy,’ ” he said in a quavering, sad-sack voice. “ ‘They all know me in Winnemucca. You just tell them Hoppy sent you, when you get to Winnemucca.’ ”
“And crossing the Sierra mountains,” she continued. “Tell him what happened in the Sierras when the train stopped.”
Galvin gave her a playful push on the shoulder. “No, you tell it. It’s your story.”
She closed her eyes, fixing her mind on that rocking, bumping boxcar. “We’d been traveling for about twenty-four hours,” she said, “and I was so tired and dirty. No bath, no toilet, nothing to wash with. The train was winding through the Sierras, snow on the mountains, and we came to this high pass and for some reason the train just stopped, and we sat there waiting—five minutes, ten minutes. Just below us, maybe twenty yards from the tracks, there was a little mountain pond—clear water, icy cold, surrounded by wildflowers. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and I kept staring at it, thinking how nice it would be to jump in the water.
“Sandy dared me to run down and take a swim. I felt so filthy, and the train hadn’t moved in a long time, and it seemed like we could be there for hours, so I decided, why not? I ran across the meadow to the pond, stripped down to my underwear and dived in the water—and it felt so good! I was floating on my back looking up at the blue sky when I heard a whistle and the lurch of the wheels.
“My God! I was so scared. I scrambled up the bank with my clothes in my hand. I thought I was going to be left behind. The train was moving faster. Sandy held out his hand and screamed at me, ‘Run faster!’ and finally hauled me up into the boxcar. I was dripping wet, practically naked, and he was laughing at me. Here I had almost been stranded in the Sierras, and he was laughing like it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen.
“You bastard.” She looked at him so tenderly as she said that. She made bastard sound like the sweetest word in the dictionary.
“WHAT ARE WE CELEBRATING tonight?” I asked. I didn’t want to disturb their reminiscence, but I was beginning to wonder whether Galvin had devised any nominal excuse to stage this reunion.
“Right! I almost forgot. But if we’re going to celebrate, we need another bottle of wine.” We had killed the La Tâche by then, so Galvin led us back downstairs, the three of us lurching into the wine cellar. “The wines we’ve already had were so good,” he said, “that we have to find something even better. Otherwise, what’s the point? It has to be red Burgundy, doesn’t it? Can’t drink a Bordeaux now. Can’t drink white.” He pulled a 1978 Romanée-Conti from the rack. “This is my favorite wine in the house. A thousand dollars a bottle. I’ve been saving it for a special occasion, and this is it. No question about it.”
Galvin lifted his glass ceremoniously when we were back upstairs. Even when he was tipsy, he was a gentleman. “I ask you both to join me in a toast to the new Washington Sun and Tribune! That’s what I asked you here to celebrate tonight. Because it’s working. Despite all the crap from Bacon and his flunkies, we’re making progress. We are climbing that mountain.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “What’s working?”
He had a coy half smile on his face, like the first time I met him on the lawn behind his house. “I just got preliminary circulation numbers through October fifteenth. We’re up more than ten thousand in newsstand sales. That may not sound like much, but the Sun hasn’t had a month-to-month circulation gain in more than three years. Most of that is probably the bingo game, but so what? It’s working. We’re going to make it! We just have to keep up the pressure. Push, push, push—get people to stop all their negative bullshit and get with the plan, because we’re rolling. They better get on board, or they’ll be left behind.”
“Push, push, push!” said Candace, imitating his cheerleading voice. She put her arms around his neck and gave him a big kiss. She was drunk, but still . . .
“Congratulations, boss,” I said. He was hard to resist when he was i
n this mood. It was the secret of carnival barkers and army generals and religious prophets too—that ability to get listeners to suspend their own judgment and accept the other person’s. It was working! All his goofy ideas—The Anti-News, the contests, even the front-page editorials—were finding an audience. He was declaring war on the newspaper now; I hoped he understood that. But listening to him, crazy as his ideas were, it was hard not to think he might be right.
GALVIN WANTED TO SMOKE a cigar, so we went back outside, to his patio overlooking the pool. Candace lay down on the couch beside him and rested her head in his lap. The wine and the free fall in time had left her pleasantly disoriented. She was humming show tunes and making occasional wisecracks to Galvin. My date reappeared, wagging his tail and carrying that tennis ball in his mouth. I lobbed it into the pool and he dived in after it—creating a golden wake, like phosphorescence, in the floodlit water.
Candace was barely listening. It seemed like a good time to ask the question that had been on my mind all evening. I wondered how to approach it. He was such a good actor, it would be hard to know whether he was telling the truth.
“What’s happening in the market?” I asked. “I don’t know anything about the financial world, but people tell me things are getting soft. Anything to that?”
“Your friends are right,” he said. “The squeeze is on, and it’s going to get unpleasant for people who don’t know what they’re doing.”
“What does that mean? Remember, I’m a financial illiterate.”
“Do you know what liquidity is? No, of course you don’t—but it’s basically just a fancy word for money. And there isn’t any. Starting about a month ago, money began to get tight. The junk-bond market basically vanished. In practical terms, that means you can’t issue any debt now that’s rated below A. Lenders will charge you more in interest than you’re going to make back on the project. The IPO market is dead too. Two months ago, people would invest in any fool thing, but now everybody’s risk-averse. It’s a funny market. Not for amateurs.”
The Sun King Page 15
