If Men Were Angels

by Reed Karaim

  “Hello.”

  “Hello,” I said. “This is a surprise. Finally leave Washington?”

  “No. You?”

  “I’ve joined the traveling circus. I have to sweep up, but they promise me I’ll be performing death-defying stunts on the high trapeze any day now.”

  She sat down on the bench.

  “That’s too bad. From what I remember, you’ll look silly in tights.”

  “Then maybe I can be shot out of a cannon.”

  She shrugged. “No need for a helmet.”

  And that seemed to exhaust that. We sat there for a moment.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve joined the circus too,” she said. “I joined the campaign staff yesterday.”

  An old woman pushing a baby carriage full of broken dolls approached us. Robin reached in her pocket and handed the woman a quarter. I shook my head. Across the plaza Thomas Crane’s car came around the corner from the Palmer House. He was making his last political calls after the fund-raiser and we would be moving soon.

  “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you,” she said carefully.

  The woman with the carriage stopped to watch Crane’s long black limousine. Slowly she lifted one of the dolls, blackened and burnt on one side of its face and missing an arm, and pointed to the car. She whispered secretively into the doll’s charred ear.

  “Not press,” Robin said quickly. “I’ll be traveling some, but it’s a deputy policy post, rural issues.”

  “Rural issues?”

  “Don’t laugh.”

  “Hell, no. We’ll call you Aunt Bee.”

  Robin stared across the plaza at the limousine and I could sense her resolve. I had greeted her kindly enough and this conversation was headed in the direction she wanted. She had only to finish it up and she could get on with the day’s march. Her hand slid nervously along her thigh.

  “This is important to me, Cliff,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  “I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to know if there’s going to be a problem.”

  A harried commuter in an olive trench coat hurried across the square. I thought about the place I had reached, how hard I had worked to get here.

  “No, I think it’s been long enough,” I said, “more than a year. I’ll mention it to my editor, but there shouldn’t be any trouble. A decent interval has passed.”

  She snorted softly, a half-laugh, half-smirk. “That’s funny. That’s what Kissinger said he wanted when the United States pulled out of Vietnam.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A decent interval before the collapse.”

  The afternoon light over the top of Chicago was the work of a turn-of-the-century urban impressionist, the buildings thick-shouldered against the sky. Our cities are best seen from the top down these days. On the plaza the rag man was trying to remember if he had hit us up yet and the doll lady was sitting on the stone, talking earnestly to two of her charges, one held in each hand. They were broken, of course, both of them.

  “I’ll try not to collapse,” I said.

  She kissed me on the top of the head.

  “It’ll be fine,” she said. “We’ll have dinner sometime.”

  I watched her walk away. She moved with a lilting precision, like a sliver of mercury drawn between two points. The way she’d always moved. I watched her cross the plaza and turn a corner. The sun was so bright it blurred my vision and the last I saw was a flash of her wrist, maybe a bracelet, shining in a pinpoint of radiance and she was gone. But not gone, not gone at all, of course.

  I am a reporter and my life is measured in the ephemera of the news business. Yesterday’s disasters, scandals and controversies are the markers I use to locate myself in time. So I seem to remember that she left me on a slow news day. A revolution in Africa, perhaps, or a typhoon in Asia, but nothing that mattered to American readers. I remember there were sirens in the street and the flag above the White House was still. I remember the sky was gray. I know I was standing by a window, waiting for the day to end. When the phone rang I was startled. I dropped the receiver once.

  “I’m not coming home until Sunday,” she said. “I’ve decided to stay here a couple of days.”

  That was all she said, but I knew what was happening. She spoke the way you speak to a condemned man, someone for whom the verdict is in, appeals exhausted. She spoke in the tone you use, all emotion carefully excised, when you are finished with a person. I asked her what was going on and she was evasive. She had to go. She’d talk to me when she got back.

  She returned in a dark business suit and sat on our couch with her knees primly together, the lacquered shells of her shoes lined up side by side, her shoulders squared and her hands squeezed so tightly they turned bloodlessly pale in her lap. She told me she’d met another man, but I should never, ever think that was the reason she was leaving. I should never be allowed to give myself that excuse for failure. I should never be allowed to feel wronged. She was very clear on that. I must understand that the responsibility, the error, the cruelty were all mine.

  Is this how modern women say good-bye, I wondered? But that was unfair.

  I tried to bargain. I promised all the things you always promise. I remember talking for hours while the sun went out beyond the window and there was only my voice in the darkness while she sat with the pale arch of her neck catching the light from cars on the freeway seven stories below and my voice, hollow and foreign-sounding and speaking too fast, and then finally exhaustion and silence.

  “What’s he like?” I asked.

  “He’s wonderful,” she said.

  Washington that night was afloat in light, the cavernous buildings ghostly in their artificial illumination. I walked past the White House. I watched flag shadows dance along the Washington Monument. I walked down the Mall, turning at the glass mausoleum of the Air and Space Museum. Across the black lake of the reflecting pool, I saw Grant slumped deep in his cloak atop his stone mount, while beneath him the grim shadows of his soldiers bent to their conquest.

  Fourth Street was deserted and my footfalls echoed under the railway bridge with the sound of solitary applause. The Southwest Fire Station was quiet, lit yellow windows above closed yellow doors. I came to Mick’s Office, where the jukebox sent the painted window shuddering. I stood in front of the bar for a long time before going in, feeling the dull thud of the music in the back of my neck, staring at the beat of light against crimson glass.

  The floor shook with a strange assortment of dancing couples, men with little girls in ivory dresses, women with young boys wearing baggy sport coats or garishly colored athletic wear. I found a spot at the corner of the bar and ordered a scotch. I drank three quickly, the bartender watching me out of the corner of his eye as he deliberately poured the third. Understanding of the simplest things seemed to arrive from a great distance. I was watching parents dance with their children, as if I had stumbled into a wedding celebration, but I couldn’t see a bride or groom anywhere. The bartender followed my eyes. “Thursday night, neighborhood night,” he shouted. The boys strutted. The little girls wavered between strutting and twirling like ballerinas. Their parents swayed with concentrated frowns to “River Deep, Mountain High.” There was an enduring bliss in the way they moved across the floor without touching.

  I set my glass down so hard it shattered, slicing my hand across the palm. I left my barstool carefully, holding my hand closed by my side. On the way to the door someone tripped me accidentally, and I stumbled but righted myself and, looking straight ahead, made it to the street where the music was only a mocking heartbeat.

  The offsale down the block sold me a bottle of scotch. The Waterfront Mall was closed, so I went a block east, through the projects. I didn’t care. I settled on a wooden bench along the Potomac, watched reflected lights float like drowned moons, heard the creak of wooden boats along the pier, smelled diesel oil, rotting vegetation and brackish water. The wind came down the river and I curled up like a question mark.
The cut in my hand was white, peeled open like cellophane. Everything hurt. Everything hurt more than I thought it could.

  I drank until the lights smeared in the current and the Washington Monument lost its spine and did a mocking mambo across the sky. The world slid down into darkness, but I was all right until a round face with almond eyes and a silly Cupid’s bow of a mouth swam up and whispered that I should never ever think there was an excuse. I should never think that I was not to blame. The fault was all mine. I crawled to the railing and vomited into the river.

  Myra came walking across the plaza carrying a cup of coffee. She sat down beside me, idly picking an invisible mote of dust off the sleeve of her purple jacket, which was decorated with astrological signs.

  “I saw your old girlfriend,” she said.

  “She’s joining the campaign.”

  “Oh boy.”

  She pried the lid off the coffee and offered me a drink.

  “You wanna talk to momma?”

  Across the plaza the rag man was dancing with himself, arms up in a shambling arabesque.

  “You got a day and a half?”

  Myra took the coffee from me and sipped it.

  “We’ve got fifteen minutes. That’s why I came to find you.”

  I watched the rag man spinning on a broken heel, sure of his elegance despite it all.

  “She comes from a long line of idealists,” I said.

  Myra sighed. “You poor boy.”

  “Never fall in love with an idealist. You’re bound to disappoint them.”

  She laughed and waited for me to say more. When I didn’t she threw the cup of coffee into a trash can.

  “Come on. We’re heading out.”

  “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  She gave me a look and then walked away without glancing back. I watched her go and wondered if it would have felt better to talk about it. It was just an old story, anyway. You love a woman more than you thought you could love anyone. You bet everything on her and move to a place where you can start over together. She leaves and you don’t think you can live but you have to find a way.

  Here is what you do, Myra. You rebuild your life through detail. You get out of bed and you shower and you dress. You tie your shoes, you fasten your belt, you straighten your tie, and you think hard about all these things as you do them. If voices start to whisper, you go for a walk, counting each step, or you swim hard at your apartment’s pool, moving up and down each lap with measured strokes until your arms and legs are made of clay. You keep a bottle of something that doesn’t make you sick by the bed and you drink until you sleep and your dreams are a Dali landscape where all things, the hands of time and the pale hands of a woman, melt in the end. You get up the next morning and you shower, you dress, you tie your shoes, you fasten your belt, you straighten your tie. You face the simple complications of the outside world. You find it easy to work harder than you ever have. You focus on your job as if it rests at the end of a gun sight, standing in the Capitol’s shabby hallways late at night to catch senators leaving twilight budget deals, taking the body watch in the rain at Andrews when world leaders visit, volunteering for the night shift at the Pentagon during the international crisis of the month. You monitor arms talks, trade talks, labor talks, reform talks. You shave. You tie your shoes. You straighten your tie. You swim until your breath comes in ragged gasps and you drink from the bottle at night until the world sighs into blank darkness. You do these things. You do them every day until you wake up and you stare in the mirror and you know that you have won yourself back.

  You have been stripped of a lot of things, but you go out into the world with what is left, and if you are a romantic sort, or endowed with a wry sense of humor, you pretend that you have found your truest self, this thin duke arisen from the grave.

  You find that you have done your job so obsessively you are given the chance you’ve always dreamed of, to cover a presidential campaign. You take your leftover self out to face the new world and you find life is still out there.

  Then one sunny day in Chicago she strolls across the plaza, kisses you on the head. “It’ll be fine,” she says. “We’ll have dinner sometime.”

  V.

  WATCH THE world go by outside a window for a while and it is odd how insubstantial it becomes, odd how easy it is to let go of the small familiarities that tether you to day-to-day existence: the walk to the train, the light across the rooftops, the smell of the elevator, the greeting in the hallway. It is strange how simple it is to become a passenger, how easy it is to surrender to someone else’s plan. We traveled nonstop the next two weeks, flying back and forth in the tiny jet that was all Crane could afford, watching the country slide by in planes of darkness broken by the solemn clusters of lights that are small cities seen from above at night, and it was possible to drift and not think too much about what was waiting down the road, about the incomplete circle that suddenly seemed to be the past three years of my life.

  There were only four of us traveling full-time with Crane then. Nathan, Myra, Stuart and I sat on facing benches in the back of the plane, drank wine, listened to R.E.M., and repeated the jokes forming between us while Starke glowered from his seat and Crane read beneath a lamp that filled the hollows of his angular face with darkness. I noticed he read almost every spare moment, heavy tomes that he cradled in his lap, the titles hidden from us. Sometimes Angela was onboard and she leaned in a tiny bundle against his shoulder, sleeping while he bent over his book, never coming back to visit us, ignoring the disdain inherent in the melancholy music we chose.

  We followed him to union halls, senior citizens centers, high schools, cafes, sometimes no more than a street corner where two or three bundled-up, anonymous figures stood clutching signs fragile on their wooden stalks: CRANE in blue on an angled field of red and white. He spoke to anyone who would listen; he ran ads he could not afford in both Iowa and New Hampshire, and his numbers moved not at all and his money trickled away in advertising and motels and signs that fluttered in disrepair across two states. He had closed his Washington office and his staff had gone without pay for a week when we arrived at the first debate.

  Crane climbed out of the van, brushed crumbs off his slacks, ran a hand through his dark tangled hair, and stared at a ridiculous hotel, a cartoon of a Bavarian chateau set down in the middle of New England. He was less than five hours from an appearance that could determine his future and yet, as his brown eyes climbed up the Teutonic façade, they filled with delight.

  Starke followed Crane out of the van. “You start with a meeting of the leaders of the nurses’ association,” he said. The debate was being held in front of a national health care conference.

  “Good. My God, what a place.”

  “Susan Peldrona is the president. You’ve never met her. She’s tall with dark hair. Beverly Kees is the vice president. She testified a year ago before your committee. She’s blond, wears glasses.”

  “Fine.”

  “You’ll get some pretty technical questions about Medicare reform.”

  “Great, John. The nurses are no problem.”

  Myra and I wandered up. She was wearing a quilted full-length coat with a Mandarin collar straight out of the Chinese imperial court.

  “Senator, are you saying nurses are easy?” Myra asked.

  His eyes drifted down reluctantly.

  “Only easy to talk to.”

  “Okay.” Myra smiled hopefully.

  He fixed her with a blank look. A snowball whizzed over my shoulder and exploded at his feet. Two small boys disappeared laughing behind a car.

  “I’m under attack,” Crane said, “and I haven’t even spoken yet. I guess I better retreat.”

  We followed him across the parking lot and toward the hotel. Halfway there he turned to me unexpectedly.

  “I read the profile you wrote, Cliff. You did a nice job writing about my brother. A lot of people can’t get past his accident.”

  A day earlier the Catton book ha
d fallen out of my bag as I was passing his seat and Angela had picked it up and handed it to him with a smile. “Oh, God, there’s another one of you on the plane.”

  He looked at the cover and then at me curiously, even shyly. “You’re interested in Civil War history?” he asked finally.

  I nodded, feeling awkward. We are supposed to know everything about them and they aren’t supposed to know anything about us.

  “Have you ever been to Galena?” Crane asked.

  “I hope to do it during one of my trips back to your state,” I said.

  His enthusiasm was surprisingly boyish. “It’s wonderful. They’ve kept the old house. Did you ever read Captain Sam Grant?”

  “Yes. I liked it a lot.”

  “It’s a great book. You have to go then.”

  I stood in the aisle and we looked at each other; it was one of those suddenly intimate moments, both of us smiling, aware of an unexpected connection, uncertain what to say next. He handed the Catton book back to me.

  “We’ll have to talk about it sometime, Cliff.”

  That was all, but things had been different since. The day before he had greeted me with a quietly wry aside about the history of Portsmouth. Now I walked along feeling self-conscious. There is nothing that fills a reporter with doubt as much as being complimented by someone he is covering.

  “Bill’s a good guy,” I said.

  Crane smiled. “My brother was meant to be a member of the Grateful Dead. Only he was born tone deaf.”

  “He never mentioned that.”

  “I’m sure it’s the only thing he missed. Anyway, I thought you did a good job.”

  We reached the entrance to the hotel and he took a last breath of fresh air and composed himself. His forehead smoothed out and the skin around his eyes relaxed. His eyebrows slid up and curved into a position of polite curiosity. His mouth widened slightly into a modestly attentive smile. His lifted his chin and, with his coat collar turned up, he was all dark and sharp angles. He ran his fingers briefly through the hair along the back of his neck.