If Men Were Angels

by Reed Karaim

  She stood in the window, staring at the city, arms across her chest, shivering in her T-shirt. “My brother’s anniversary,” she said. “My brother’s anniversary. Why should you remember?”

  When she was finally asleep I slipped out of the covers and went to the window. The Bromo-Seltzer tower stood bathed in light like some misplaced fairy-tale battlement. In the distance I could make out the turrets and false buttresses of the First Maryland Bank. Her brother’s anniversary. She meant the anniversary of her brother’s death. Lights began going out in a nondescript building down the street, lopping off each floor, the building shrinking before my eyes until all the lights were out and the silhouette came back, haunting and larger than ever. I stared out the window for a long time, and I knew it was useless. I would never see the world through her eyes.

  Across Times Square the Fuji sign flickered as if worn out by a long night of dazzling tourists. I leaned against the window and the glass was cool against my forehead and I felt myself pulled against my own reflection, the cold shadow of inescapable desire.

  I was half undressed when I heard the knock on the door. I opened it and she was standing in the doorway with a half-empty bottle of wine hanging in her left hand. She stood with the yellow light from the hallway tangled in her hair and her eyes wide and tired and very sober.

  “I got done early.”

  Without thinking I reached up and put my hand on her shoulder.

  “Tell me this isn’t the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” she said.

  She started to say more, gave up and slipped from the light into the darkness of my room just before she kissed me. I felt her hips settling against my thigh as they always had, her arms around my neck, her mouth against mine and everything coming back and I knew it had always been there, always waiting.

  We slid backward to the bed. The lights from the window flashed along her cheek and when she opened her eyes they were a neon blue-green and stared at me with the surprise of a creature sprung from television. I felt her breath along my neck and then buried in the front of my shirt, damp against my chest. Her hand slid down my stomach and then all the old patterns reestablished themselves, memory taking over and leading us. We had always had this. This had always been fine. I rolled her toward me and her breast settled in my hand, and I must have smiled or laughed because it was there as it always had been, and I felt her smile as she kissed her way down my stomach and her fingers climbed my ribs like a musical scale. Then it was all the same but new, and every shadow we threw against the wall, every breath cut short, every shudder of the bed, every arch and descent carried us deeper into the past. In the end, when she burrowed her nose into the hollow of my shoulder and fell asleep, I stared at the ceiling, watching the reflected lights and, one by one, they went out. I wanted to see Times Square in the dark, but I couldn’t move without waking her, so I lay in bed and tried to imagine cornices and pediments and gargoyles perched on crumbling ledges reasserting themselves in the insubstantial moonlight.

  II.

  WE LEFT Manhattan in seven buses festooned with signs, pennants, and red, white and blue bunting, rolling down stained brick canyons in a symphony of rattles and gnashing gears, the morning throngs waving and holding their thumbs in the air, until we came to a bridge and floated out over the gunmetal river. Then more city and industrial park and the flat scrubland of New Jersey. Cars on the other side of the freeway slowed as we passed, gaping at the spectacle: police cruisers with blue lights whirling, motorcycle cops, a Secret Service van, two black limos, all smoked glass and menace, then the happy circus of our buses, and a final, abashed police car.

  I sat in the third bus and watched the country pass. Robin had been gone when I woke from a dead, dreamless sleep. The note on her pillow crumpled beneath my hand: Early staff meeting. See you on the road. I held it above the bed and a mote of reflected sunlight caught a corner, and I was holding a peel of orange flame that spread slowly through the translucent flesh of my hand.

  Myra slumped in the seat beside me, a hand draped across her eyes. When she groaned I could no longer ignore her.

  “You all right?”

  “Never try to drink with a Chicago alderman,” she said.

  “Where’d you go?”

  “Oh, God, you know, Amalgamated Polluters, or maybe it was United Weapons Technologies. Some hospitality suite. There were free drinks and food and there was this evil man who rules part of the Southside, and I had to swill scotch with him for half the night . . . We have hard jobs.” She squinted at me through a flat, gray eye. “How about you?”

  “In bed like a good boy.”

  “I thought you might be out with your ex-squeeze.”

  “She had to work.”

  Myra batted a puffy eyelid like an aging chanteuse.

  “Too bad. Manhattan. Moonlight. The sweet smell of corruption everywhere. There’s nothing like politics for causing you to toss your scruples out the door.”

  I stared out the window.

  “Is that right? The alderman teach you that?”

  “The alderman. The alderman could corrupt Mother Teresa. But I remain pure.”

  “In a relative sense, of course.”

  “Now, now, Cliff O’Connell. We’ve known each other too long for you to get petty.”

  “We haven’t known each other that long at all.”

  “It’s not the years, it’s the mileage.”

  “That’s very good.”

  “I stole it from a movie.”

  “Of course.”

  Nathan leaned forward from his seat, holding the New York Times. “Did you see this Johnny Apple piece? He breaks the party’s prospects down region by region, goes over the strategy.”

  Stuart, sitting in front of Myra, looked as if he’d swallowed a piece of chewing tobacco. Apple was the senior political correspondent at the Times, and a small, relentless wheel in the infinite rack that was Stuart’s existence.

  “Lord, the strategy’s been the same forever,” he said. “The Democrats always come out of their convention looking good, saying they’re going to challenge the Republicans down south and out west—make them defend their base—then take the two coasts and enough of the Rust Belt to win. You always get these Lil Abners in Georgia and Alabama talking about how they might stick with the Dems this time. It always sounds great. And then it falls apart.”

  “Apple says Crane’s running slightly ahead across most of the South,” Nathan said, “and he’s way up out west.”

  “It’s been a holiday so far,” Stuart said. “Wait till the other side gets going.”

  A CNN cameraman, portly with a pair of glittering button eyes in a soft pillow of a face, listened from across the aisle. The buses were packed with members of the press who’d taken advantage of the relatively cheap cost of ground travel to climb on board for a few days, jittery with their first hit of campaign adrenaline. But the cameraman had been with us from the beginning, always dressed in red suspenders, green T-shirts and white tennis shoes. We called him Santa.

  “It’s like the Three Stooges,” he said. “The Democrats are Curly and the Republicans are Moe. You know how it is. Curly’s walking along feeling good.”

  He fixed his face in an expression of blissful ignorance and waddled down the aisle.

  “He bumps into Moe.”

  He popped his eyes.

  “And it’s whap, smack! Whoob-whoob-whoob-whoob!”

  He poked his own eyes and punched himself in the stomach.

  “It’s taxes! Bam!”

  A wild roundhouse on the top of the head.

  “Or the death penalty! Pow!”

  He boxed his ears.

  “Or burning the flag! Nyuk! Nyuk! Come here you little . . .”

  He pulled himself across the aisle by his nose.

  “Owowowow! And Curly never knows what hit him, but there he is, sitting on his ass in a vat of molasses with a crowbar wrapped around his head.”

  He rocked back and for
th, rolled his eyes and slumped to his seat. The bus broke into applause. He stood and bowed somberly.

  Myra had opened both eyes. “The Three Stooges as a metaphor for American political debate. Wait until the French get ahold of this.”

  “Maybe this time he’s Moe,” Nathan said, meaning Crane. “And the president’s Curly.”

  A general shaking of heads. No one thought he was Moe.

  “The only real question,” Myra said, settling back in her seat, “is whether he’s Curly or not.”

  Our bus growled up an exit ramp. Local police cars, spread along the road in a blue daisy chain, fell in behind us as we rolled toward a steel-sided building in an industrial park.

  “But what can they use?” Nathan said. “He looks clean as a whistle.”

  “They’ll find something,” Stuart said.

  We stopped outside a chain-link fence and the driver swung the door open. Reporters were pouring out of the buses ahead of us. We grabbed bags, cameras and tape recorders, scrambling for the aisle. Myra watched through a cocked eye.

  “If he’s not Curly,” she said, “we sure are.”

  I saw Robin only briefly that day and the next. We rode through West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and back into upstate New York, living off sandwiches and granola bars tossed into the bus as if we were animals at the zoo. We stopped in cities and small towns and flat spots on the side of the road where small crowds huddled. We piled out of the buses in a paratrooper drill at every stop, throwing ourselves out the door to catch up with Crane, who always seemed to be ahead of us.

  Cannon Newspapers believes in interviewing the public obsessively, so I wandered along rope lines and talked to people doing well, people without work, people with sick children, people who had come to see a celebrity, people who had come to scoff, people who believed, people who wanted to believe. They reminded me of the men and women who trooped into my father’s newspaper office every week, the ranchers, teachers, ministers, small businessmen. In another way, they reminded me of my grandfather, who came over from Ireland when he was fifteen and, despite a lifetime of hard labor on the Great Northern Railroad, held with quiet fidelity to his love for his adopted country.

  Hearing them, I thought some dam of public skepticism had cracked. The polls might show that people didn’t believe in much of anything politicians said anymore, but on the road you felt that was, at least in part, a bluff. If it is possible for an entire nation to become mediawise, then it had happened to the United States. The public knew cynicism had been established as the only knowing stance, and when the pollsters asked, they gave the answer expected.

  But they came and they listened, and, although it is a truism that you can’t tell anything by the people who come to cheer, the veteran correspondents said these were the largest crowds they had seen this early in a campaign. And late at night, even with all the cynicism journalists horde as a defense against inevitable disillusionment, there was no denying the figures on the side of the road, waving flags, holding up handmade signs, or simply waiting for a chance to applaud an indistinct figure in a passing bus.

  We ended up in Chautauqua, New York, on a beautiful afternoon, the sky a taut blue, women holding their summer dresses against a warm breeze, heels clicking across sidewalks baking in the sunlight.

  The Victorian cottages were painted in the elaborate patterns of the period, bright blues and forest greens outlining windows and doors in descending frames of color that stepped backward through time. The stage had been set up on the steps of a brick hall at one end of the commons. The press room was in a cottage with a wide porch generously provided with rocking chairs. I sat in one and read a history of Simon Bolivar my aunt had sent me. Bolivar’s fortunes were at low ebb; he was hiding from the Spanish in a swamp, up to his chest in dank water, when he began declaiming loudly how he was going to retake all of Spanish South America. The officers hiding with him quivered—Spanish soldiers were nearby—but nobody dared suggest he lower his voice. He went on at the top of his lungs, a declaration before God and his enemies, and within three years he made it all come true, a man so certain of his destiny he could summon the future into existence while half-submerged in a swamp.

  The book was too dark for the gentle nature of the day. I put it down and stared through whispering trees at the sky. When Robin leaned over the railing all I saw at first was the top of her head.

  “Come with me,” she said. “You’ve got to see this.”

  She led me down the street to a house where the Secret Service stood on the porch and a limousine waited out front.

  “He’s in there meeting the local Dems,” Robin said. “He’ll be out in a second to ride down to the stage.”

  She edged us around the small crowd along the sidewalk.

  “Do you see her?” Robin asked.

  “Who?”

  She whispered the name of a writer famous for eviscerating the powerful in heavily psychoanalytic prose squeezed between the perfume ads in Vanity Fair. I didn’t recognize her at first; then I saw a short woman with brown-and-gray hair piled in a matronly bun. She was older than I expected, her face wrinkled and weighted down with a second chin they covered up on television. She spoke to a bald photographer with skin the color of Silly Putty.

  The Secret Service agents came to attention. Crane stepped onto the porch and stopped, as if the brilliance of the day surprised him, then strolled down the sidewalk. The people along the line called his name.

  “Watch what she does when he gets to the door of the car,” Robin said softly. “This is so great!”

  Crane entered the funnel of people around his car. He shook a few hands and, as he stopped beside the limousine to sign something, the magazine writer pirouetted around the fender, bent backward, precariously balanced on one leg, turned so she was looking at her photographer as her face slid close to Crane’s. It was an illusion—she was three feet in front of him—but they appeared to be cheek to cheek.

  Her photographer snapped the shot, capturing a surprisingly girlish smile.

  “Yess!” Robin squeezed my elbow. “I’ve been watching her. She’s done this twice before. She almost tripped him to rub up against his shoulder in Erie.”

  “Really?”

  “She’s a groupie.”

  “She’s a killer on the page.”

  “That’s different. That’s business.”

  Robin spoke as if the distinction was a fraud. She put her hand on my shoulder and her dress swished against my hip. She’d been on camera a lot since the convention and she’d taken to wearing skirts and dresses, often with a gold necklace I had given her many years earlier.

  Crane’s car pulled away and we walked back down the street.

  “One thing I have learned on the trail so far,” Robin said.

  “What’s that?”

  “The famous will disappoint you.”

  There was a brief rustle of applause, reaching us like a breeze moving through the trees. A local congressman was on stage.

  “What famous have led you to this conclusion?”

  Robin’s smile was full of secrets.

  “They’re sent to us for private briefings. Rock stars, movie stars.”

  “So like who?”

  “Bono. Tom Cruise. Barbra Streisand. Ringo Starr even stopped by. He’s a vegetarian now, did you know that?”

  “He always was the lovable one.”

  “He wanted to talk about animal rights.” Robin tossed her hair back and it flashed as if sloughed off by the sun. “You can’t write any of this, you know. You have to get it somewhere else.”

  “Okay.”

  She waited a moment, teasing me, her cheeks a high pink. We strolled under the trees, staying along the edge of the crowd. People looked at us and smiled.

  “You know how it is. They come back after the rallies and they all want to meet him. They all have their causes now. So, after he gives them a few minutes, they get sent my way and I run them through the campaign policy on whatever it is
they care about, and then I listen to their spiel. That’s really what it’s all about—listening to them.”

  “Does he really give them only a few minutes?”

  “Well, he gave Robert Redford half an hour. The environment, you know. I got to spend half an hour with the heavy metal band the Stiffs.”

  “Yeah?”

  “They’re all for condoms.”

  “Thank God.”

  “The lead singer thinks they should be provided free in little bowls in public restrooms, like mints in a restaurant. He was really concerned that they aren’t available in airports. I think a lot has happened to him in airports.”

  Crane stepped to the microphone and I looked at the faces turned toward the stage. I know you all, I thought, I have seen you before. The way you lift your chin and the light of hopeful surrender comes into your eyes. I know you, I have you: this secret about yourselves even you do not admit. I will have you always.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been busy every night,” Robin said. “I didn’t mean to disappear like this. For two days. Maybe a little, maybe that morning, when I woke up and there you were . . . just like before. But I wanted to see you before today. It’s just been crazy.”

  Crane said something and the crowd around us let out its breath, a gentle exhalation like the sigh of a wave sliding down the sand.

  “We still have our jobs,” I said.

  She faced me. “Steven told me you bumped into him at the convention when he was . . . plagued with a moment of self-doubt. He said you decided not to write anything. That was nice of you, Cliff.”

  “We made a deal.”

  “Sure you did.”

  “Let’s get together tonight in Buffalo,” I said. “I’ll rent a car and drive you to Niagara Falls.”

  “Cliff! It’ll be two in the morning by the time we get in.”