If Men Were Angels

by Reed Karaim

  If my editors found out it would be the end of my career. But maybe that was all right. I’d been there with him from the beginning. I’d seen more than I’d hoped. I knew something about the country I hadn’t. I knew its secret: despite all its knowing cynicism, in the face of a culture of compulsive mockery and disaffection, it wanted to believe.

  Robin was standing outside my hotel when I pulled up. She yanked open the passenger door and sat down.

  “Don’t write the story,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Don’t write it, Cliff.”

  “How did you find out?”

  She wore a silk blouse and it stuck to her under her arms and down her sides. She leaned toward me, the tendons in her neck defined as if carved out of wood.

  “She called Crane to tell him. Duprey called me because I was in Springfield. I got here about fifteen minutes ago. Have you called your bureau?”

  “No.”

  She rocked back in the seat, looked at the roof. A long breath slid out of her chest. “God, I was afraid I’d miss you.”

  Her door was still open, but she filled up the car, slumped against the seat in a boneless curve, breasts falling against damp silk, one leg bent, knee against the dash, slender fingers hanging over the seat, inches from my leg.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” I said.

  That brought her back. She turned, red-faced, eyes holding mine desperately.

  “What happened between them eighteen years ago is a private matter that has nothing to do with anything. Nothing to do with politics or what kind of president he would make.”

  I heard echoes of Duprey in those words, maybe Starke, perhaps even Crane. I was watching an understudy read frantically from a cobbled-together script.

  “You’ll wreck the life of an innocent girl, Cliff, destroy the privacy of a family and you’ll hurt Crane. And what will it accomplish? It has nothing to do with what he believes, how he has conducted his public life. How will the country be helped?”

  “It would be the truth.”

  “A hundred things are the truth.” The words rattled against each other. “It’s the truth that the country needs him. It’s the truth he can make a difference. It’s the truth he’s going to win. It’s the truth it was a long time ago. It’s the truth it doesn’t matter. It’s the truth—” She rocked backward, her breath hissing between her teeth.

  “You know he’s the best man for the job,” she said.

  “That’s not my decision to make.”

  “Jesus, you sound like a lawyer. Are you a fucking lawyer? You know he’s the best.”

  “The voters—”

  “Christ, Cliff! Cut it out! You know he’s the best.”

  “Sure.”

  “Then don’t do this.”

  “Robin.”

  “Please don’t do this.”

  “Robin.”

  “Jesus, Cliff, please don’t do this!”

  Her hand settled on my shoulder.

  “Cliff, he’s going to win. Think about that. Think about what it means. He’s going to win. He’s going to be president. But he won’t if you write this.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do, damnit. You know.”

  Her fingers moved frantically along my collarbone.

  “Cliff, please, please please.”

  I almost told her what I had decided. I have thought back a thousand times and I will never know why I hesitated.

  “Listen to me, Cliff,” she said. “I love you.”

  Then I knew I had been fooling myself. You cannot escape what you know. I closed my eyes and felt her fingers against my skin one last time.

  “I love you too,” I said. “I always have. Get out of the car.”

  “I don’t understand. I love you.”

  “Get out of the car.”

  I made my first call to Duprey. I had his beeper number and he called back in three minutes.

  “Where are you at?” I asked.

  “We’re in the car on the way to the hotel,” he said. “In Atlanta.”

  “Is Crane there?”

  “Let’s talk a little, Cliff.”

  “Put him on, Steven.”

  “Cliff, listen, we’ve been friends for a long time—”

  “You can put him on the line or you can read this in the paper tomorrow.”

  Silence. His breathing. “For Christ’s sake, Cliff.”

  The phone moved and Crane came on.

  “Cliff. You don’t want to talk about Ulysses S. Grant this time.”

  I could picture him in the back of the limousine, the manner in which he sat with his legs crossed at the ankles, the polished captoe oxfords, the blue suit, the way he watched the passing landscape of motels and fast-food restaurants and discount outlets, as if they must contain within their banal façades some greater explanation of the journey. I could see all this—I knew it, had been there, awed, hypnotized, converted—and it filled me with rage at the arrogance that created a universe of such false promise, a universe with a lie floating like a black hole at its center, bending and distorting everything in its presence until the world turned inside out and all you were left with were lies.

  “She says the daughter is yours, Senator. Is she telling the truth?”

  “Well, I don’t—”

  “Maureen Barstow of Phillips, Illinois. She said you are the father of her child, a seventeen-year-old named Kara. Is she telling the truth? Is she lying?”

  “Could we get together to talk?”

  “I’m in Illinois, Senator. You’re in Atlanta. We can’t get together. We’re talking now. I’ll ask you again: is this woman lying? She claims this is your daughter. Kara.”

  “Kara,” he said, and the way he said the name was an answer, but not enough.

  “Kara. If you won’t comment I’ll put that down. Is she lying?”

  I have read that he closed his eyes, that he did not speak for ten seconds. I only know it seemed like a very long time.

  “Maureen’s never been a liar,” he said.

  “Not now?”

  “Not now.”

  I heard a shout in the background. The phone changed hands abruptly.

  “Cliff!” Duprey shouted. “That is not an admission of anything! Do you understand? Not a goddamn thing!”

  “I know you will want to talk to my boss about this story,” I said. “Do you have the number?”

  When I called Washington I asked the bureau chief and my editor to get on the line together. When I finished talking, there was a long pause.

  “You have it on tape,” my editor said finally. “You have it all on tape? You have him on tape?”

  “Yes.”

  “On tape? Everything they said?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus,” she murmured, “‘I’ll never lie to you’ . . . Jesus H. Fucking Christ . . .”

  Then there was the great debate, of course, about the rights and the wrongs of putting what we knew into print, the slow creak up the hill toward moral justification. I was on the phone for an hour, but the tinny ringing of jubilant bells never left their voices through all the hand washing, through all the tortured granting of self-absolution, and I knew from the beginning we were going to run the story.

  BOOK THREE

  I.

  WHEN THE worst of it was over, after the press conference and television appearances, I was given some time off and drove down to Ocracoke Island in North Carolina, as close as you can get in this country to the end of the world. I stayed for a couple of nights at a motel in the village on the southern tip of the island. I couldn’t sleep and I went for walks early in the morning and watched the light gather over the ocean and the beach take on the color of human skin while sand crabs tried to bury themselves alive. I watched the fishermen and the birds and the tourists who came on the ferry to drip ice cream on the wooden sidewalks. I stood at the edge of the ocean and tried to imagine the green horn of another continent glimmering in the distanc
e, and after a while I couldn’t stand it any longer, and I took the ferry north to Hatteras and drove up the Outer Banks and turned inland and headed toward Washington.

  I drove until I reached Norfolk, where I pulled into the Quickstop for gas. Newsweek was on the stand in front of the cash register. On the cover Crane was coming down the steps of his plane late at night, his shoulders slumped, his eyes on his weary feet. In the background the flash illuminated a hard circle of faces along a wire fence and they were ghastly in the light, mouths open, eyes like slivers of coal. There was no forgiveness in them, no pity, no understanding, nothing but anger. There were two tabloids farther down the magazine rack. Three other women were now claiming to have had Crane’s children, one who said she had married him at age fifteen in a ceremony in Elkton, Utah. There was a computer-generated photograph of the two of them standing in front of a log-cabin church.

  The man behind the counter recognized me, a pleased and baffled look creeping past his watery eyes and up the wrinkled dome of his forehead.

  “I’ve seen you on television.”

  I nodded and signed my credit card bill.

  “You’re the one that caught Crane with his girlfriend.”

  A woman behind the counter came over to stare.

  “She was his girlfriend a long time ago,” I said.

  “I never trusted him,” the man said. “There was always something in the way he looked at you, like he was hiding something behind that pretty-boy smile.”

  The woman laughed from the back of her throat. “Hell, you were going to vote for him last week, Johnny. You said you wouldn’t trust the president to piss on a campfire.”

  “I never trusted him,” the man insisted, his eyes focused on me, seeing television. “Any man that cheats on his wife like he done ain’t worth shit.”

  “It was before he was married,” I said.

  “When are you gonna be back on television? Are you gonna be on them Sunday morning shows again?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He shook his head sympathetically. “You’ll do better next time, son. Won’t look so nervous.”

  Pine flats rolled away on both sides of the road, a gray Confederate sky following me up from the South. Rain swept around the car, steam rose off the highway, and the world blurred outside the windows. I clenched the wheel and hurried toward Washington, flying blind through sheets of water tossed up by trucks. I drove faster, feeling the car rise up on the road like a penny skipping across a river. My windshield began to fog and I let it climb halfway up the glass before I turned on the fan. I needed to get back home, back to the campaign.

  I stopped in the bureau when I reached Washington. My editor caught me walking to my desk.

  “You’re back early.”

  “Tanned, rested and ready.”

  She pushed her dark hair out of her eyes and squinted at me dubiously. “Nelson wanted to see you when you came through.”

  Nelson Ambrose, the bureau chief, was watching television when we knocked on his glass wall. He stood when I entered and clasped my shoulder with the restrained affection with which a Victorian Englishman might have welcomed a son back from the war. He was short and trim and had the thoughtful, neatly cropped, salt-and-pepper beard that Cannon Newspapers liked on its editors. As he settled back in his chair, he absently straightened a shabby green tie across his blue oxford shirt, the two-tone flag of prep schools everywhere. He’d been born the son of a milkman in Nebraska, and the uniform was only one in a series of compensations.

  “I thought you were due back in a couple of days.” He had a mellifluous, quietly commanding voice.

  “I found out I’m not a beach person. I’m ready to go back to work.”

  He tilted his chair back. The television murmured away behind his shoulder.

  “Great. Can’t say enough about what you’ve done, Cliff. I know it hasn’t been easy.”

  “I guess you watched me on Nightline,” I said.

  He smiled blankly, a line of perfectly regular teeth appearing through the beard. “Of course I did. You acquitted yourself well.”

  Ellen bit her lip. “I’d like to buy you a new tie.”

  “So you’re ready to get back to work?” Ambrose said, swinging gently back and forth in his chair.

  “I thought I’d fly out tomorrow morning.”

  “You’re sure you want to go back on the road with Crane?”

  Behind him shells were falling on a village street. A woman in a scarf fled from one pockmarked building to another.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re an important employee, Cliff. Just want to be sure this is what you want, returning to the trail.”

  “Yes. It is. It’s what I want.”

  “That’s great. Whatever you want, you have earned. You’ve done extraordinary work and I know it hasn’t been easy. Just wondering if it might not be time to think change. We could make you a senior correspondent, writing think pieces on what’s happening in the minds of the voters, talking to real people. Might be bracing. You could travel where you wanted. Do the stories you wanted. Maybe spend some time traveling with the president. God knows, you’ve earned it.”

  “I’d like to stay on with Crane.”

  Ambrose nodded as if agreeing completely. “What sort of access do you suppose you’ll have?”

  A woman was dancing across a kitchen on the screen. She opened an oven and a chorus line of dinner rolls danced out.

  “I’ll be there with other reporters,” I said, trying to sound dispassionate. “They can’t throw me out of the day’s events. One on one, I know it’s going to be hard, but I’ll work around it. I didn’t start out knowing anyone. I’ll manage. Just like I’ve always managed.”

  He nodded again. “I wonder about the flash point of having you back out there. There are people in San Diego who are afraid it could be seen as a provocation.”

  I knew the company had been getting calls and letters since the story appeared. The last count I’d heard was in the thousands. Somewhere in San Diego, right now, they were watching the sun glimmer on the bay, thinking, we made 20 percent last year, Wall Street is happy, the stockholders are happy, the view from this office is beautiful, soon I’ll go home to my lovely family in my nice house in La Jolla, I don’t need this wild-eyed anger simmering up from that odd and unsettling country out there.

  “I can see how they might worry about that.” I pretended to ponder the awful possibility I could be making life difficult for people in big offices. “But there’s another side to the coin that I’m sure has occurred to you, Nelson. If I get pulled off the beat, it’s going to look like we’re retreating. It’s going to look like we’re scared. Like we’re backing off.”

  Nelson tugged at a cuff. “We wouldn’t want that,” he said uncertainly.

  I shook my head sympathetically. “You know what it’s like. If the other members of the press sense we’re unsure about what we’ve done, we’ll never have a moment’s rest. We’ll be answering questions from Howie Kurtz at the Post every other day.”

  Nelson’s hatred of Kurtz, the media reporter at the Post, had been a small, carefully tended fire since Kurtz had ridiculed the bureau for an internal memo signed by one Nelson W. Ambrose announcing that Cannon Newspapers was switching to “high altitude” journalism. The metaphor was meant to convey some abstract notion of reporting that took in the entire landscape. Practically, it meant nothing, as the previous year’s switch to “high impact” journalism meant nothing. Dying industries, like condemned men, seek endless redefinition. But Kurtz’s column caused a small tick that throbbed for a day and a half in a white patch of Ambrose’s beard. Now he tilted his chair forward and sat up as if something distasteful had settled in the bottom of his stomach. After a moment he smiled at me.

  “Just wanted to make sure this was what you wanted, Cliff. You know this campaign better than anyone. If you’re up to it, you’re the man we want out there.”

  Ellen was silent u
ntil we were seated at her desk, our backs to Nelson’s glass wall.

  “Nicely done,” she said. “But why?”

  “Like I told Nelson.”

  She brushed her hair out of her eyes. “Bullshit. You know it’s going to be hell.”

  I saw a tarmac, infinite in the night, and on the edge, a haze of lights. I could hear the murmur of the crowd, a keening of anticipation floating like a fervent whisper across the asphalt.

  “I’ve just come too far to get off now.”

  She closed her tired eyes and I knew she was weighing her job, our friendship. For the first time I realized we were friends in a final and absolute sense: we could no longer survive without each other.

  “We’ll try to help you back here,” she said. “Fill in the holes wherever we can. There’s probably somebody in the campaign still talking to Mary.” Mary Finley was the reporter who filled in for me on the road.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Have you eaten supper?”

  It took me a second to remember. “No.”

  “You want to get a bite?”

  “I really need to go back to my apartment and throw some clothes in the washer.”

  She waved me away from her desk. “Go home. Watch a movie, get drunk. I’ll tell Mary you’re coming out tomorrow.”

  My apartment smelled like stale bread. I opened the curtains and was surprised to discover the National Cathedral floating against a pink sky like some misplaced piece of Europe. An avalanche of mail sat beneath the slot. I sorted it into bills and everything else, until I found a letter from my mother: Dear Son, It has been so long since I’ve heard from you. I hope you are doing well. I saw you on television and was so proud. I know your father would have felt the same. You have stayed true to the things he believed in, though I am sure it has been hard. The weather here has been hot and dry . . .

  I folded the pages and put them aside. There was nothing else worth opening. I sat on the couch and looked around. Four rooms. Wooden floors. High ceilings. Had I really felt at home here once, or had it always been a place of physical and spiritual storage? I couldn’t remember, but I missed the anonymous comfort of a hotel room. I walked through the tiny dining room to the tinier kitchen and found a Rolling Rock in the fridge. Returning, I saw myself in the dining room mirror, a dark-haired fugitive with surprising circles under his eyes. The telephone rang.