If Men Were Angels

by Reed Karaim

  Duprey scratched his beard and covered his smile with his hand, staring above our heads at something on the wall.

  “Congratulations,” Craig said. “Of course, it doesn’t mean a thing.”

  “Not unless they’ve moved the election up five months,” Stuart said.

  “Nothing at all,” Duprey said. “Waiter, could you bring me another beer?”

  We finished in the restaurant and tumbled out onto the street, laughing and talking too fast. The night was warm and the city was wide awake and full of light. We came to the barber pole lights of North Beach and Stuart stopped, casting a pipe-cleaner shadow across the damp street.

  “I’ll see you all tomorrow.” He waved a limp hand. “Behave as the distinguished members of the establishment I know you are.”

  We watched him disappear, sunk in his private gloom. Craig led us down an alley and through a neon arch into a cavern filled with college kids wearing clothes made up of holes, men in elegantly formless jackets, and women in black stockings that made their legs disappear so they floated on upside-down buttercups of colored silk. A shock of white hair hung in the barmaid’s night-of-the-living-dead eyes. We found a corner where we could stand together and yell in each other’s ears over music thudding from another room.

  Euphoria leaked out of us somewhere in the middle of the first drink. Nathan and Myra argued listlessly. Steven drank quietly behind his beard. The young aide boogied with his eyes closed. The producer raised the painted circle of her mouth to Craig’s ear and he nodded his sculpted chin and his mouth settled into a lazy smirk. All of it struck me, suddenly, as a tired road show, a brittle comedy of manners that had been treading a succession of flimsy stages for too long.

  I patted Nathan on the shoulder and mouthed good-byes to everyone else. Myra grabbed my arm.

  “Come on,” she shouted in my ear. “We’ve just about determined exactly what states Crane’s going to win this fall. We need your insight into all those flat rectangular ones. You know, West Dakota, East Montana.”

  “He wins everywhere,” I said. “He conquers the world.”

  “That’s too easy. There has to be uncertainty. There has to be drama. We’re wondering about the moose vote. Is that solid?”

  “The moose vote is solid. He wins East Montana. I guarantee it. Good night.”

  Duprey finished his beer. “I’ll walk out with you.”

  We waved and left the last, shipwrecked remnants of our party watching as we waded toward the door.

  The sidewalk was damp, and we sent rising and falling shadows before us as we descended. We let the ringing in our ears recede. We breathed the ocean air.

  “Well,” I said. “He did it.”

  Steven shook his head as if in astonishment.

  “He did do it.”

  We walked a while.

  “It’s strange,” I said, “how such little things, a word here, a gesture there . . .”

  “It is, isn’t it? That’s the thing that’s amazed me since the day I began in this business. You run for months and you can win or lose in fifteen seconds . . . Not always, but sometimes.”

  We passed an alley and the sweet odor of rotting fruit. Something moved in the shadows. A cat.

  “We have nothing to be afraid of from each other,” I said. “Such simple words. Kind of hackneyed. Who would have thought the country was waiting for that?”

  I could see Duprey’s smile in the dark.

  “The mysteries of public affection,” he said.

  “It all flowed from that,” I said. “Everything. Nobody would have given a damn if it hadn’t been for that night.”

  “You like it?”

  “I’m saying it’s the only line we’ll remember from this campaign.”

  Duprey laughed. The fog curled like cigarette smoke around the lights marching down the hill. We were both a little drunk.

  “Off the record, my friend.”

  “No.”

  “Come on.”

  I knew I shouldn’t do this.

  “All right.”

  “Never to go any farther than this conversation?”

  “All right!”

  “I know that line was good. I wrote it.”

  “What?”

  “We heard the Reverend was going to try to crash the thing. How do you think they got tickets? I know someone who knew someone with the Reverend . . .” He waved a hand dismissively. “Anyway, we had a good idea what they’d try and we were ready. Chaos creates opportunity for the underdog. A political maxim. Came up with it myself. Just now. Anyway, I wrote the line about an hour before the debate. Suited Crane well, don’t you think? It always helps if they believe the stuff.”

  I felt like a child who opens a cellar door to find an entire world full of shining, unknown things growing in the dark.

  “You bastard,” I said. “I should write that tomorrow and screw you.”

  We came down a steep block, the sidewalk uneven under our feet. Steven stared at the hotel lights below and his gait never faltered.

  “But you won’t. I’ve known you long enough to know your rules.”

  “I should.”

  “But you won’t.”

  The lamps in the lobby spread honey on the glass. We stopped at the door.

  “I’m going to walk for a while,” I said.

  Steven stroked his beard.

  “You won’t,” he said.

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “I should have kept my mouth shut. Look, I’ll give you something before the end. Something no one else has. Maybe I’ll give you this after the election. Who knows? We’re going to go on a vacation to Greece after it’s over and I may not give a shit by then.”

  “Go to bed. Don’t worry about it.”

  “But something, all right?”

  “Sure. See you tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”

  He waved and went through the door. I watched him disappear into the elevator. He never looked back. I stood on the sidewalk, feeling the ocean out there somewhere, faint and damp, heavy with fog. Maybe I would get up early tomorrow and see the Golden Gate Bridge. I never had. I thought of my father. The train had reached the sea and its light was searching the waves. Where did we go from here?

  The campaign turned around and followed Thomas Crane back across the country. The real race, the race against the president, was just beginning. I was going back to Washington for the break between the primaries and the convention. The bureau had a reporter covering campaign spending, but I had decided to go through all of Crane’s financial records: Federal Election Commission reports, congressional financial disclosure forms, even state filings. It’s a complicated story, Latrelle Gregory had said, how poor boys get rich and who they owe when they’re finished. Well, I would start with the paper trail.

  But not tonight. I didn’t want to think about it tonight. I followed the coils of fog toward the ocean, passing shuttered coffeehouses and boutiques with dazed arrays of summer pastels prostrate in the windows. I walked until I came to a bar, Whistling in the Dark, and laughed and went in.

  The interior was dark enough, clarinets and saxophones collecting dust on the walls, jazz scratching across a tape. I ordered a beer from another pale bartender, sipped Anchor Steam and thought about what Steven had said. Crane’s signature moment of genius and it had been worked out in advance. I wished he hadn’t told me.

  A familiar voice, high and fast, drifted out of a booth. Robin was telling a story. I turned and I could see her hands move, slender fingers held straight for emphasis. Her hair swung like a curtain back and forth across her face. The young man seated across the table leaned forward listening, stiff as a bird dog on point.

  Well, of course.

  I turned back to the bar and downed a fourth of my beer. When I was seventeen I once sat on the shore of the reservoir outside of Havre, listening to a party gathered on the other side of the water around a bonfire. Couples danced on the beach while the f
ire rose in a whirl of cinders. Their shadows reached halfway across the lake, cavorting across a thousand shivering slips of the moon. I wanted to join them, but I knew the uninhibited dance wasn’t in me, no matter how much I wished it was. The urge to join the circle around the fire, yes, always, but not the dance. You find out about yourself at odd moments. I was seventeen and I knew I would always be one of those watching from outside the circle.

  I turned to leave and Robin stood behind me, a pleased, silly smile on her face.

  “I didn’t see you come in. You looked so morose standing here alone, I wanted to come ask you to join us.”

  I looked at the table where the young man and another woman were waiting.

  “I don’t think so. Not tonight. Thanks.”

  “That’s too bad. I’d buy you a drink.”

  I managed a smile. “A drink? You owe me more than one.”

  “So come on.”

  “I can’t. I have an analysis to write tomorrow. I should have gone to bed hours ago.”

  A line creased her forehead.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m just tired. Tell your boss to stop making news on deadline.”

  She laughed. “We’ll try to wrap it up around noon in November. Come on and have a drink. You’ll like Randy and Beth, they’re great.”

  I shook my head. “Thanks.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “All right.”

  “Well . . .”

  I dropped a five-dollar bill on the bar and turned to go. Robin touched my arm.

  “There’s something I should have told you a while ago.”

  She looked past my shoulder, her eyes too bright.

  “Danny and I split up. I didn’t know if you knew that.”

  “No. I didn’t know that.”

  “Before the campaign.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, it’s all right. It was bad for a long time.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Photographers,” she said. “It’s like being a kid with five thousand dollars worth of toys and people who will fly you anywhere to play with them. Growing up is a liability.”

  I reached for my beer and it had disappeared. I very much wanted something to hold in my hands. I held on to the edge of the bar.

  “Anyway. We split up a few months ago. It’s a relief, really.”

  Neither of us knew what to say. We looked at each other, and it was as it is sometimes between two people who have known each other a long and difficult time, when suddenly everything, everything you feel and have ever felt, is right there in front of the two of you.

  “I should go,” I said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I can’t make small talk tonight, Robin. I don’t know why.”

  She glanced at the booth.

  “I’ll walk out with you. Just give me a moment to say good-bye.”

  We walked up the sidewalk, our heels echoing in the fog.

  “Now that we’ve won, I’ve got to go back to Springfield for a while,” she said. “I probably won’t see you until the convention.”

  Streetlights appeared like Chinese lanterns hung in midair. Buildings slipped in and out of the fog. Robin slid her arm into mine and I shivered.

  “Cold?”

  “It’s the ocean. You can feel it in the air.”

  Robin took a deep breath, arching her back to fill her lungs.

  “We’ve run out of country,” she said, “and now we turn around and go back.”

  “Tired of it yet?”

  “Cliff, I don’t want it to end. I don’t ever want it to end.”

  We walked across a square and the hotel took shape on the far side, an island of hazy yellow light. She leaned against my shoulder and I felt the sway of her long swinging gait.

  “I don’t want it to stop,” Robin said. “I don’t want to look back. I don’t believe in history, not the way you do. I believe in this, this chance we have, all of us, right now. I believe in second chances, Cliff. I believe in rebirth. I always have.”

  She turned to face me, her round face pale and moonlike, the scent of champagne sweet on her breath.

  “You know what I remember about you?” she said. “I remember the time that ferret got into the house. And you were going to protect me and you stuck out the broom, and it crawled over it, and you jumped back and ended up behind me. And then we could hear the woman calling out on the street, Timothy, Timothy. And I realized it was just somebody’s pet, and I picked it up.”

  She laughed. “I liked that you never pretended you weren’t scared. You always told the truth. You never pretended to be more than you were.”

  “I thought you thought I knew what I was doing.”

  “No, Cliff. I thought you were sweet and I thought you were honest. I wanted you to be strong.”

  We were so close I felt each word beat softly against my skin.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Now everything is new.”

  “I want to see you again,” I said.

  “Oh, God.”

  She looked past my shoulder into the dark.

  “I want that, too,” she said.

  There was a noise in the fog, a drunken hurrah, and when we turned a half dozen campaign aides were spilling out of the hotel. They recognized Robin and shouted her name and staggered toward us, some of their bodies strangely square, boxes with arms and legs. When they were a few feet away I saw the square ones were wearing campaign posters tied front to back like sandwich boards. They were all young and their clothes had the rumpled look of people who have been hugging and grabbing each other all night. They circled us.

  “A party. Come on, Robin! It’s on a yacht! Everybody’s there.”

  Robin shook her head but her eyes danced with delight.

  “Robin! Robin! Robin!”

  “Go,” I said.

  “No . . . it’s okay.”

  “Go ahead. You’ve earned this.”

  She looked at me gratefully.

  “I’ll see you when—”

  “Right.”

  Robin squeezed my hand and slid into line. They whooped with satisfaction. She winked and her hair fell in her eyes. They grabbed each other around the hips and congaed down the square. “Crane! Crane! Crane!” they chanted and his dark, sad eyes bounced past larger than life. I watched them disappear into the fog, dreamlike laughter echoing long after they were gone. I stood there, hands deep in my pockets, the bemused expression of a professional observer securely fastened on my face, but the thrill of their pounding feet arched up my spine and the rhythm of their chant caught my heart, and I surrendered to the sudden surpassing joy of it all.

  BOOK TWO

  I.

  THERE WERE fireworks over the Hudson on the first night of the convention and a party in Bryant Park where thousands moved restlessly across the grass in search of an elusive sense of privilege crushed by the weight of collective desire. Myra and I stood the crowd and the dinosaur rock stars entertaining on stage as long as we could, and then escaped through the police line and walked to the end of the block to gaze at the lions on the steps of the New York Public Library. They gazed back through proud stone eyes, and we stood in contemplative awe as the celebration vaulted the library and settled around us in a faint cacophony of feverish voices and electric guitars.

  The second night I was sent to a club on the East Side for a reunion of the 1972 campaign. The club was a warren of rooms done up in red and black, too small for the crowd of middle-aged men and women who gathered around their candidate, an unassuming man who once carried a tattered flag for peace in a time of war. He was the center of attention until the World’s Number One Box Office Attraction, famous for movies of ritualistic weapon use and mass homicide, appeared behind a phalanx of bodyguards. The crowd slid his way like water in a tilted glass. The party rolled along, but I had a brief, dislocating sense that the more esoteric physicists were right, and the univer
se must be collapsing in on itself, and it was only a matter of time until we were all scuttling backward into the sea.

  On the third night I stood in back on the floor of Madison Square Garden, bodies pressed against me. The lights were down. The stage rose at the end of the hall like the prow of a ship pushing its way through a human ocean. The giant screen at the back came to life, and it took me a few seconds to realize what I was seeing. The Crane family stood in front of their Berthold home, a sepia tint added to an old photograph. The cottage seemed warm and quaint. The family smiled with a cheerful and alien resilience.

  A hallucinatory version of Thomas Crane’s life unreeled on the screen, all uplift and achievement, determination and tragedy bravely overcome. The hushed narrator moved back and forth in time, and we saw Crane as a crusading college student, a young army lieutenant, a bright-eyed groom, a youthful congressman, a child holding a flag on the Fourth of July.

  Now a young man wearing a baseball uniform stepped on to a porch, grinned shyly and loped off down a street gentle in the hazy light of dawn. A quick cut to the young man swinging a bat and sending a ball rocketing toward an unseen outfield, then a slow dissolve, the grainy film replaced by videotape, and the young man became Thomas Crane in Florida, at bat again. The swing was much the same and the ball rocketed onto a corner of the outfield and you felt a swelling satisfaction at promise fulfilled, dreams realized, an entire mythology falling into place and settling in your stomach like a solid meal.

  A voice came down from on high, the voice of God, or at least James Earl Jones: “The Democratic nominee for president, the next president of the United States of America . . .”

  He appeared wearing a suit so black his face and a single hand floated disembodied above us. The noise rolled down from the highest seats, filled the air with the sound of a hundred locomotives charging down a mountain. The lights on stage came up and Crane filled out in our presence, standing before us with a boyish smile and eyes that briefly closed, as if to hold the thunderous ovation within himself.

  I had pulled one morning of pool duty during the convention, and we’d gone to a day-care center in the Bronx, where Crane was briefly surrounded by toddlers. They tugged at his pants and held their arms out to be picked up, and I saw something complicated and defenseless happening in his face, an expression that brought back a vague memory I could not place. Then he remembered the cameras and glanced at me with a look of comic helplessness.