If Men Were Angels

by Reed Karaim

  “We can’t throw out the polls now, Angie,” he said hoarsely. “We’ve already paid for them for the rest of the campaign.”

  “A doll. Like the ones they wave at you,” Angela said. “Only less lifelike. Sit, stand, smile, stare adoringly at my husband. What child? Oh, that child? Yes, of course, I knew. Of course, it was all right. Of course, it doesn’t matter. Of course, I feel the same.”

  Feeble applause for some unknown speaker washed back from the stage and they stood side by side, facing the opening in the curtain.

  “It is not a case, Tom, I would take to court.”

  He collapsed into himself, staring down at his hands, fingering a palm as if he had never seen it before.

  “It might help if you stepped out in front of the public a little more,” he said.

  Angela’s finely boned shoulders sagged.

  “That’s what you think?”

  “You would just introduce me. A wife introducing her husband.”

  “A wife introducing her husband.”

  “Yes.”

  They were speaking softly enough now they could barely be heard. The agent at the top of the stairs looked down at them and an aide gestured it was time. Angela straightened herself, tugging slightly at her dress, running one hand quickly beneath her eyes.

  “No one writes a word for me,” she said.

  Crane nodded, not looking at her. He started toward the stairs but she stepped in front of him.

  “Remember you asked me for this,” she said. “When they call you a coward.”

  The next morning a stiff wind blew stray newspapers across the base of a different stage. They skittered and slid, flipping into the air like playful ghosts while the crowd outside the factory huddled against the chill and Angela Crane stood behind the podium on three thick catalogues someone had piled up at the last minute, stood on tiptoes in a blue short-sleeve dress, held her hair out of her face with one hand, and stared into a parking lot full of sullen faces. “I asked to speak today,” she said, “because I have listened to too much said about my husband the last two weeks that is untrue, and I thought it was time you heard from the person who knows him the best, who has known him for more than fifteen years. Thomas Crane is not a perfect man, but he is not what you have heard. I want to tell you about the man I know . . .”

  She spoke with a precise cadence that reminded one of the measured steps of someone walking into a lion’s cage with nothing but the steadiness of her gaze to keep herself from being devoured. For the next few days the world watched hypnotized as she asked for a fair hearing of her husband’s virtues, watched from high school football bleachers, union halls, barricaded streets with dead leaves whirling past in the gray air, watched from living rooms and kitchens and department stores and airport bars, watched this tiny woman in Chanel suits and Donna Karan dresses facing down the beast.

  Campaigns run on money and faith. The volunteers who stay up all night sorting luggage and stuffing envelopes with no material reward except cold pizza need to believe. Their candidate can be behind, victory unlikely, and they are still okay if he wins the ballot in their hearts. Take that away and the machine loses energy and falls apart. The schedule was changing daily as Crane searched for safe harbors and all would have been chaos anyway, but there was no determination left to make anything work. Luggage ceased to arrive. Meals were forgotten. Rooms went unbooked. At two in the morning in Pittsburgh a bus dropped thirty of us off on a street a mile from our hotel. We watched taillights disappear and started hiking through the city.

  We were climbing a hill when a jacked-up Chevy Impala with chrome rims and a Steelers pennant on the whip antenna cruised past. “Hey mother fuckers! You lost!”

  Myra dropped her bags and shouted back: “Hey motherfuckers! You should see the poor bastard we’re following!”

  The car slowed and then laughter echoed from the interior and it sped up and over the hill. We resumed our slog, stretched along the sidewalk like a Bedouin caravan.

  Stuart’s shoulders were bent from the weight of his bags, his thin nose pointing toward the ground. “I’d take Thomas Crane’s sorry constipated hypocritical northern ass and kick it halfway up this hill, if I could,” he said without warning.

  “Now, now, Stuart,” Myra said. “Haven’t you been listening to Angela? He’s badly misunderstood.”

  “I saw your story. You’ve been understanding. How was it you described him? ‘The wounded husband propped up by the love of a good woman— like a bad country western song waiting to be written.’”

  “You know what it was?” Myra was panting slightly. “It was when she started talking about their trip to Haiti and those starving children and the tears she saw in his eyes. I probably shouldn’t write when I’m throwing up.”

  “What about you?” Stuart aimed his nose at me. “What do you think? You’re the man responsible for this happy state of affairs.”

  The woman who wrote for the Dallas Morning News, a duffel bag slung over her shoulder, was hiking past along the curb.

  “Yes. What do you think? You enjoying this hike?”

  The caravan was silent, slanted and ghostlike under the moon.

  “I think if she waited until she stopped throwing up,” I said, “she’d miss her deadlines.”

  “A practical reporter,” Myra said. “His eyes on the essential things.”

  We crested the hill and part of the city floated below us. Lights, glass, stone, moon, clouds.

  Stuart paused and set down the bags, carefully straightening his spine. “They were pretty rough on you last night on Larry King,” he said more gently.

  “I didn’t see it.”

  “One caller kept calling you, ‘Clint, this so-called journalist.’”

  “Clint?”

  “Clint.”

  “I like it better,” Myra said. “You could walk around all squinty-eyed, saying things like, ‘When you call me that, smile.’”

  “I believe he described you as embodying all the destructive selfishness of the media, or maybe it was the selfish destructiveness of the media. Someone from Grand Forks, North Dakota, named Mike.”

  I stopped to look at the glowing city. It seemed more beautiful suddenly than anyone could say.

  “Good for him,” I said.

  Stuart swung his bags and his long legs carried him down the hill.

  “The public,” he said. “It’s not that they know nothing, it’s that they’re so damn proud of it.”

  There was nobody from the campaign to greet us at the hotel, and we stood in another line and got our keys from a stoop-shouldered clerk who kept apologizing over and over again for something about the water. My room was small with faded pink roses on the walls. I sat on the edge of the bed, so tired I didn’t think I could untie my shoes. What do you think? You’re the man responsible for this happy state of affairs.

  I think it is a miracle, every minute of it. I think we are lucky to be here, lucky to bear witness, and if it hurts, if it blisters your feet, if it means you can’t eat, if it means you can’t sleep, if it means you need a drink at night to close your eyes, it is still a marvel, a moment in history, and it is all part of the truth, every shout, every angry word, every faltering step, every night lost in a place like this. It is worth all the bullshit and all the pain, even this, even this sad limping end to the story, because it is the thing laid bare, and that comes with its own justification. I think it worth everything because it all holds within it the truth, because it is true.

  After a while I stood up and unpacked tomorrow’s clothes. I looked for my Lands’ End bag and realized I had left it downstairs.

  The lobby had a single mirrored pillar circled by a cushioned seat. The mirrors were cracked and the cushions stained dark by wear. Steven Duprey sat with his legs splayed, a bottle of Jim Beam in his hand, my bag a few inches from his feet.

  “My pal,” he said. “My buddy from Montana.”

  He wasn’t slurring his words, but he sounded very tired.<
br />
  “Have a drink,” he said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Come on, you fuck up my life beyond compare and you won’t have a single, solitary drink? My pal.”

  I sat down beside him and took the bottle.

  “Tim wants to kill you,” Steven said. “He talks about ripping your head off and carrying it down Pennsylvania Avenue on a pike.”

  The mirror felt cool against the back of my head.

  “Well. It’s not an inaugural parade,” I said, “but it’s something.”

  Steven swung his head to look at me. “Funny.”

  I tried to pass the Jim Beam back to him. He considered the bottle gloomily.

  “I don’t drink,” he said.

  “It helps. Trust me.”

  The old man behind the desk stared at us through eyes the color of old window shades.

  “Here’s what I want to know,” Duprey said. “I want to know what happened between you and Robin the night you found out about Crane’s daughter.”

  “Nothing.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t believe it.”

  The door opened with a brush of wind across our legs. Randall Craig and one of the plane’s attendants swept in. He saw us and stopped, startled out of his ironic self-composure for once. I shook my head and he moved on reluctantly.

  “Don’t fuck her over, Steven,” I said. “She was doing a good job.”

  He took the bottle out of my hand, lifted it and swallowed once, grimacing.

  “Got the latest numbers tonight,” he said. “In depth.”

  I waited.

  “Nowhere to run, pal,” he said. “Nowhere to hide.”

  He stared at the tile floor as if embarrassed.

  “We bet too much on him, on ‘Saint Thomas the Pure.’ We traded too much on it and we let other things go. We thought we had a natural and all we had to do was put him on stage. In this fucking age, when everybody sleeps with everybody, you wouldn’t think it’d make a difference. I mean, Jesus Christ, we know the name of every president’s girlfriend for the last thirty years. They go on talk shows, they write books. But you see, old buddy, that’s not how they saw him. They thought he was different. That was the whole magic act. Now they don’t believe a thing we say.”

  “They’re listening to Angela.”

  “Oh yeah. That’s good for a day or two.”

  “You could go scorched earth. Bring the other guy down to your level. Like you did in the Texas governor’s race.”

  He squinted at me. “You’re offering advice?”

  I knew I should go, get up and leave, but we were talking and that was something. “Just thinking out loud.”

  “Won’t work. Just confirms what a hypocrite he is. Besides, you’ve got to have a candidate who’s ready to fight.” He took another drink, larger this time. “It’s all gone out of him.”

  He handed me the bottle and I let it sit in my hands. All gone out of him.

  “I never thought you’d do something like that,” Duprey said. “I thought you had a different standard.”

  I’d stayed too long. I took a drink.

  “You never thought I’d do it,” I said, “because you thought I was easy.”

  He shook his head. “Fair.”

  “That’s just another word for easy in this business, and you know it.”

  “I thought you saw through all the bullshit to the essential things. That’s what fair is.”

  “Give me your essential things.”

  “He would have been a good president. That is my essential thing, Cliff.”

  The old man behind the desk rustled some papers, staring at our bottle with a combination of longing and resentment. We were keeping him awake.

  “He lied for eighteen years,” I said.

  Duprey slammed his head backward against the column.

  “Get back to Kansas, Dorothy. Everybody lies every fucking day of their life, and you know it. There are lies and there are lies.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes. That’s right. That’s right. There are lies we have to respect.”

  “Really.”

  He turned and smiled.

  “You don’t think so? Tell me what happened that night between you and Robin.”

  I handed him the bottle. “Drink, Steven. It can only do you good.”

  I picked up my bag and took the stuttering elevator back to my room. I was mad and it held me for a while, but later that night, watching a square of light crawl across the wallpaper, listening to the bathroom pipes murmur, I found myself thinking of Robin waiting at my motel in Springfield, waiting for me to disappoint her again. I wondered if she had a premonition I was going to take her down with me. I thought of her pacing back and forth across the parking lot, running through the argument she had to make, and I wondered if she made the essential accommodation then, if she believed in Crane so fiercely and me so little that she prepared herself to say whatever was necessary. I could see her standing there as my car rolled up, arms folded across her chest, bony hip sticking out, hair in her eyes, the way I’d seen her so many times. I wanted to believe she still thought there was a chance I would surprise her, that she could believe in me at least that much. I watched a pale square of illuminated roses drift across the wall, and I could smell her beside me in the car, feel the heat from her, the nervous race of her fingers along the back of the seat. I was sitting beside her again, about to tell her what I had decided, and I willed myself to speak quickly this time, but I was trapped inside a small square of light sliding across the pavement. I was waiting for something, and then it was too late, and I knew I had always been waiting for the softly whispered betrayal I deserved for waiting too long.

  The next afternoon in Detroit a heckler interrupted Angela. He was booed down, but the crowd shifted restlessly as she continued. When she got to the part about a man she had known, loved, and trusted for more than a decade, an impatient sigh arose. They’d heard it once too often. I got into my room late that night and turned on the television while I hung the next day’s shirt and slacks in the closet. A comedian stood on the stage of The Tonight Show.

  “You’ve heard the latest twist in the Baby I case?” he said. “I guess there’s some doubt now about paternity . . .”

  His rubbery grin curved like a clown’s.

  “Of course, Thomas Crane immediately issued a statement denying any responsibility.”

  I kicked the thing off with the toe of my shoe, opened the bottle of scotch I’d bought earlier in the day, and drank without ice or water from a bathroom glass. I fell asleep with the bottle by the bed, and the next day, when they announced that Angela was leaving the campaign, leaving her husband alone, leaving him and going someplace secret, leaving him—we all sensed—perhaps for a long time, it didn’t hurt that much at all, and I was very glad to be on the road and holding the truth in the palm of my shaking hand.

  IV.

  THE LINE OF buses wound down the hill. We were lost and it was long after midnight somewhere in Ohio, in West Virginia, in Pennsylvania. Who knew anymore? We were lost. Rain snapped half-frozen against the windows and slipped between the panes, running down the metal walls and settling in a pool near the bathroom, which reeked from three aimless days on the road. Reporters who used it took a deep breath before entering and shut the door quickly upon exit, but the smell stole farther forward every hour.

  The seats in the back were empty. The lights were down but for a single overhead lamp throwing a bull’s-eye on the back of Nathan’s head. The reassuring clatter of a keyboard could be heard between the grinding of gears as we slid down the curve in the dark. Looking over the seats I saw a pair of taillights floating below us in the rain, reflected on the windshield above the driver’s bald head. He had refused to speak to us for two days, disgusted by the filth we left in his bus.

  I sat in the last occupied row, three from the back, breathing through my mouth and spying on the hushed metal coffin of our world. Almost eve
ryone was asleep. Three days of wandering from small town to smaller town, stopping at highway junctions and farmsteads, trading on the inbred politeness of rural folk, their awe at the unexpected arrival of this reflection of the television universe, even if the star at its center had fallen, had worn us out. There was little fire left among the press, only a longing to escape.

  The bus clattered down a final curve. The door opened and the lights came on. Groans, oaths, and the confused mutter of the sleeping, bags banging against seat frames, shoes scraping the floor. The usual questions: where are we? what place is this? what time is it? Then the rain in the face, sudden wakefulness and awareness of an unmowed hill of brown grass illuminated in razor-sharp shadows and perched on the top, a tilting barn, immense and batlike in the dark. Nothing else.

  We stood in the mud, huddling close to the buses, and watched a confused young aide lean into the rain as he hiked toward the barn. He made it halfway up the hill and then slipped on the wet grass and fell, sliding toward us on his stomach before grabbing handfuls of grass and pulling himself into a crouch, only to slip again and slide farther backward, his shirt coming up, his back pelted with rain. When he stood, his pale stomach was smeared with mud and he staggered trying to shake out his shirt. He started up the hill again and we watched, knowing there was no one up there, no crowd, no stage waiting.

  The buses had pulled in in a circle and we could dimly make out Crane behind the window in his bus. He sat at a table by himself, a damp smear of white and black, watching his aides stagger about, shouting at each other through the downpour, pointing at the dark shadow of the barn as if it could be made something other than what it was through blind rage, as lost as shipwrecked children. I glanced away and when I looked back he had disappeared. The light out.

  We flew through the middle of the night to New York. The city was as still as it gets when we pulled into the Hilton. In Crane’s suite that night, Timothy Blendin screamed at Anne Paxton, the chief scheduler: “If we’re going to campaign in East-Fucking-Asswipe, Ohio, it might be nice if we knew where it was. The only thing we’re still doing in this campaign is facing the people, but we can’t do that if we can’t find the people, can we? We can’t do that if we end up at a fucking barn at two in the morning, can we? It makes things a little more difficult if we have to campaign in front of farm animals, doesn’t it? Is that a demographic we’ve targeted, Anne? The fucking animal vote, the cows and goats and fucking chickens—”