During the press conference, Jesus sat in one of the soft chairs in the oversized suite, hands folded in his lap. The reporters packed in around him, flashbulbs popping, tape recorders whirring, keys on laptops tapping. The second or third question was asked by a woman from the Wall Street Journal: “Jesus,” she began, and it sounded like she was making an effort to sound reverent and respectful, “half an hour ago, Marjorie Maplewith’s husband, the Reverend Aldridge Maplewith, who, as you know, presides over a megachurch in Idaho and a TV empire with several million viewers … half an hour ago he demanded, in his weekly TV sermon, that you prove you are who you say you are or drop out of the race.”
Jesus appraised the woman with what I would call a pleasant curiosity, as if admiring her haircut. “Meaning what?”
The reporter hesitated for a moment. You could see the little balloon of confidence that surrounded her start to deflate. But then she pumped it back up again. “He demanded you prove you are God.”
“God?” Jesus said with an amused lifting of his eyebrows. “Have I spoken that word?”
My father was sitting in the corner, and I turned and looked between the bodies of two photographers and saw him scratching the place where his birthmark had been.
“Well, aren’t you?” the reporter had a smile at the corners of her mouth now; she knew she was about to make news.
“You say I am,” Jesus said. “The most I have ever called myself in this campaign is the Son of Man, and even that—”
“But you use the name that most people in this country use to refer to God,” the reporter pressed.
Jesus waited an interminably long time, probably a full twenty seconds, before speaking again. You could hear the plock … plock from the tennis courts next door. “Tell the good Reverend Maplewith that if he allows me to use his pulpit for one Sunday sermon between now and the election, I will give him the answer he requires.”
It was another smart chess move, and everyone in the room was scribbling or typing or snapping pictures in a mad frenzy. The Reverend Maplewith would not do it, of course, because it would mean millions of dollars worth of free publicity for one of his wife’s opponents.
Still, there was an impression left that Jesus was not directly answering the question on most people’s minds, and it was to cast a shadow over the campaign as the weeks wore on.
The middle part of the press conference was predictable enough except for the thirty minutes where the candidate answered questions in Spanish. This seemed effortless for him, and allowed the non-Spanish-speaking reporters time to take a bathroom break. Nadine Simmelton sat beside me at the back of the room and translated everything she thought I’d want to know. On immigration, Jesus came down on the side of fairness: legal was fine, illegal was not. On foreign aid, he reiterated his statement that dictators would receive nothing from his administration, and that it was important to the nation’s well-being that the gap between rich and poor be narrowed. Neither of these stances was particularly original or shocking. The question about the war on drugs put him on thinner ice: Jesus placed most of the blame not on the Colombians, the Afghanis, or the street corner dealers, but on the users here at home. Moral responsibility for any pain associated with the drug trade lay squarely on their shoulders. He did not believe that dealers or users should automatically be sent to jail unless they resorted to violence or thievery. Sometimes punitive measures were appropriate, yes, but he would promote an elaborate system of education, fines, extensive treatment, and community service instead of filling up the prisons with nonviolent addicts. Scribble, scribble went the reporters. (It would be another blip in the campaign, another small target for Maplewith and Alowich: Jesus, they’d say, was soft on crime.)
Jesus had already stated his positions on the key issues of the day—he was vehemently opposed to capital punishment, for instance—and did not seem to like to repeat himself, even when the questions were again asked in English. Four or five times he said, “I have spoken to that already, go back and check your notes,” and, “I have nothing new to say on that subject.” Since announcing his choice of his own mother as running mate, there had been a flurry of investigations into Anna Songsparrow’s past, but all of them had come to the same conclusion: her past was that of a simple Indian woman, raising an unusual child, a single mother who worked in the reservation food market while her son was growing up. Every inhabitant of the reservation who was interviewed said the same thing: that she was a good woman, wise and intelligent, hardworking, very quiet, the daughter of a famous chief, a remarkable though unambitious woman who had chosen to live a life out of the local spotlight. She was known for being generous, for keeping up on world events with a shortwave radio to which she listened every night. With the exception of one fairly brief relationship that had taken her to Kansas, she’d had no other men in her life once Jesus’s father had passed on. She did not drink or smoke, and made periodic trips into the desert for a few days to be alone—a vision quest, some thought, though no one could say for sure. Often, when there was a conflict on the reservation, the parties came to her and she usually managed to mediate it to a peaceful resolution; other than that, she stayed in the background.
So the press-feast was basically uneventful—until the final disaster … or what seemed, at the time, to be a disaster. Near the end of the two hours, a reporter from the Salt Lake City Star asked a question no one had posed before. “Jesus,” he said, “could you tell us in one simple sentence what sets you apart from the other two major candidates?”
Jesus smiled at him. Reporters stayed up all night thinking of questions like that, new angles into old territory, something that might get the candidate to make an incautious detour from practiced remarks. The slipup would be news, and the reporter would get a promotion. But there was something close to compassion in Jesus’s smile, as if he knew the game, knew it was an essential and messy aspect of democracy, knew what the question was intended to do, and knew, in advance, the kind of reaction his answer would bring. After a brief pause and without ever breaking eye contact with the reporter, he said, “I have more woman in me.”
There was a stir in the room. Reporters’ hands shot up. The guy from Salt Lake City was trying to shout above the noise that he wanted a follow-up. He’d asked for a single sentence, and now he wanted a follow-up. I was sinking down in my seat and couldn’t meet my dad’s eyes across the room. For tough-guys like him, this was not an attractive answer. More woman in me. That one line, I worried, would spread faster than videos of Howard Dean’s Vermont rebel yell. Jesus would be judged a wimp, a sissy, a mama’s boy who wouldn’t fight; no doubt the sexual preference question would be revisited.
The candidate seemed unaffected by the stir in the room, unworried by the sentence he had just spoken. He grinned broadly and stood up. He had changed into jeans and a sport coat for the occasion, and he buttoned one coat button across his flat stomach, nodded his thanks and left the room. Like a herd of mad roosters, the press corps ran off to file their stories.
I went into the room I shared with Zelda and lay on the bed, waiting for her to come in. I imagined the next day’s headlines: MASCULINE ENOUGH TO BE PRESIDENT? WAS IT CODE FOR JESUS’ ADMISSION OF HOMOSEXUALITY? IS JESUS TRANSGENDERED? Others would wonder if it had been a vicious slap at Marjorie Maplewith, whose … how should I put this … whose womanliness had never been the strong suit of her own candidacy.
I sank into a depression. I had given up my job for the guy, and he was going to blow the whole deal with a few ill-considered words. I did not want to speak to Wales. The phone rang; I was sure it was my father. I did not pick up. I did not want to get on the plane the next morning and head to San Diego for a rally we’d planned with a supportive movie star. I felt as if Jesus and everyone on the campaign were lying out in the desert, wounded, and the vultures were flying in. Another day, another few hours, and they were going to be sitting on our chests and pecking at our eyeballs, making cries that sounded like more woman in me, more
woman in me.
And then I heard the door lock click and Zel come into the room. “Wasn’t it wonderful?” was the first thing she said.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Zelda might have thought it was wonderful, and no doubt millions of other women in the country heard the remark as a compliment or, at least, a sign of Jesus’s appreciation of their gender. It’s possible that it even took some of the female vote away from Marjorie Maplewith, who was not shy about playing what the press called “the gender card” when it suited her: rolling her eyes and offering a casual aside about how little her husband did to help around the house, and so on (though the fact was, the Maplewiths were millionaires many times over, and neither of them had washed a dish or raked a leaf since the Kennedy assassination). But, as I’d feared, the big media outlets (all of them controlled by men with very little inclination to admit they themselves had some woman in them) jumped on Jesus’s remark like lions on a crippled zebra. For the next week you couldn’t turn on the TV, listen to the radio, or pick up a newspaper without seeing or hearing some commentator suggesting (delicately; they did not want to offend those women who thought a bit of womanliness in a man was a good thing, or thought their own womanliness was a good thing, for that matter) that Jesus was not man enough to lead the nation in a time of Endless War.
“What kind of man,” Hurry Linneament blustered, “I ask you, what kind of American man says a thing like that when our enemies are looking for any sign of weakness and waiting for the opportunity to strike?”
And Dr. Michael Wild, the outrageous late-night radio king, noted that Jesus had a meeting scheduled in San Francisco later in the month, and “we all know what San Francisco symbolizes in the modern American consciousness.” He was able to say this without stating that he himself had moved to San Francisco from New York twenty years earlier.
And Bull O’Malley, who had recently wriggled out of an extremely embarrassing sex scandal, settling in court for an undisclosed fee after having sworn up and down that he would “fight to clear my name,” kept on crudely intimating that Jesus “might have had the operation already” and wasn’t telling anybody.
NPR did a piece on the etymology of the word woman.
Pundits on the evening news with Jim Wearer discussed Jesus’s remark with one liberal and one conservative, both of whom probed deeply and at length into whether or not the terms “man” and “woman” really meant anything anymore.
Fox’s tickertape read, CANDIDATE CHRIST ADMITS TO “WOMANLINESS,” the inaccuracy of which did not keep them from running it for several days.
Bobby Biggs ignored the remark completely, maybe because he knew he’d landed the exclusive interview with Jesus and didn’t want to risk cancellation by offending the campaign.
But on his Sunday show, Popopoffolous and his guests spent the whole hour on it, with charming smiles on their faces (except for George Bill, who did not smile), pondering aloud whether or not it was a slip, or the latest in a series of stunningly clever political strategies coming out of the Jesus campaign. “Who is the mastermind here,” Slam Davidson concluded the discussion by asking, “and how will it play out?”
After my initial pessimism, I tried my best to ride the wave, as Jesus had suggested. There was plenty to do. Immediately after the press conference in the desert, we broke into two camps. Jesus sent Anna Song-sparrow off to make a tour of the Deep South, beginning in the Florida panhandle and traveling across Alabama, Mississippi, and into still-recovering-at-a-snail’s-pace-after-all-this-time New Orleans. Songsparrow liked her son’s idea, but suggested they make this tour about half as fast as he’d planned, riding Greyhound buses from one small town to the next along the route he’d outlined. Jesus agreed. He sent the Simmeltons and Esmeralda van Antibes to keep her company and coordinate logistics. Dukey McIntyre was to go with them for the first few days, or as long as it took to recruit a dozen like-minded machos to protect her. The rest of us—Zel and I, my mom and dad, Stab, Wales, Ada and son, and the candidate himself—took the jet over the mountains to San Diego.
It was during that short flight that something changed inside me; I could feel it physically, the way you feel, I don’t know … the way you feel it when you wake up one day after having been in bed with the flu for a week and realize you can stand up and have tea and toast for breakfast. Something changed in Zelda, too, and in Wales and Ezzie and my mother and father. I would not find out until months later that, during our short stay in Palm Springs, Jesus had managed to have private conversations with all of them. I was the last. In the hot picnic area in the desert I’d been on the receiving end of all that congratulatory hugging, kissing, and shoulder-squeezing because they’d already had their hour alone with him, their glimpse into the true workings of the world, that experience of pure friendship. It’s a measure of my conceit, I guess, that I thought he had reserved that specially for me. But that’s not the point. The point is, I think, that all of us moved closer to where Stab had been all along.
Don’t get me wrong here. I had been around more Down syndrome people, more mentally handicapped kids and adults, than almost anyone I knew, and that tends to strip you of any sentimental notions you might have about people like that being better or holier or kinder than anyone else. It isn’t so. Some of them are wonderful and some of them not so wonderful, the same as in any other group, including reporters, therapists, conservatives, liberals, whites, blacks, Native Americans, rich people, poor people, and New England Patriots fans. But Stab was one of the wonderful ones. I remembered, as we flew across the mountains between the California desert and the coast, that, the first instant he’d seen Jesus, my brother had fallen down on his knees. There was no doubt in him, no cynicism; he didn’t need to see miracles or talk over his feelings with a friend. He didn’t need to be convinced. It was as if he saw something in Jesus that I had been blinded to. Physically saw it, I mean. Even Zelda, who’d accepted Jesus much more readily than I had; even Wales, who’d quit a job that paid more; even my mom, with her Catholic certainties and rosary beads—not one of them had fallen on their knees at the first glimpse of him, the way Stab had. It was easier for the Simmeltons and for Ada and Dukey, maybe: they’d seen their children brought back to life by the guy with the flower tattoo on his forearm. The rest of us had been offered smaller miracles (my dad’s birthmark, all the mind-reading stuff), and they came later in our acquaintance. The rest of us had to go on faith.
Somehow, by the time we landed in San Diego and headed off to the hotel in our white limousines, that faith had been given to us in full measure. Being around Jesus did not feel the way it had in the previous weeks. In the limousine, for instance, I found that I could not easily meet his eyes. I wanted to be there with him, of course, but another part of me wanted to run away and hide. Lord, I am not worthy. It was like being in the presence of an actual giant or something. It was as terrifying as falling in love. Maybe, I thought, it was like having children: you’d been given a gift that was so precious, so large, that the idea of its being taken away from you was unbearable.
Imagine what it felt like, then, to be the guy in charge of making sure nothing bad happened to him.
IN SAN DIEGO, we checked into another elegant hotel, the La Jolla Hyatt Regency. Zelda and I had just finished unpacking our suitcases and hanging our clothes in the closet when the phone rang. It was Jesus, summoning her to his suite for a strategy meeting with Wales.
“Do you feel, I don’t know, a little different?” I asked her before she left. We were standing between the bed and the door. She had taken hold of my arm and was about to kiss me good-bye. Her pretty face wrinkled up slightly when I said those words. She nodded.
“What do you think it is?”
“A wall of some kind breaking down,” she said. “A line of defense falling. I see it in my clients all the time. They get to a certain point in therapy and this old fortification comes crashing apart. It’s terrifying.”
“What do you think happened?”
She shrugged, looked away, then back. “I was thinking about it during the ride on the plane. I think, when he said that about the woman in him, he was giving us a kind of signal. Showing us something. He knew people would attack him when he said that, but he said it anyway. He opened himself up to that in a way that was fearless. I think he was showing us we could open up that way, too.”
“No way,” I said. “There’s no woman in me, Zel, not a drop. Zero. Nada. I’m a hundred percent macho hombre, and if you so much as hint otherwise in front of someone else, I’m telling you, I’ll—”
It took her a second or two to figure out I was joking, or half joking at least. She gave me a wry upturn of one side of her mouth, kissed me full-on, and went out the door.
I HAD FALLEN into the habit, when we had downtime, of surfing the television channels to try to keep my finger on the pulse of national opinion. As press liaison, this was technically my fiancée’s job, but from morning until night she was overwhelmed with calls from reporters asking for this or that special favor, or pressing her for an official comment on various issues, like the medical treatment of returning soldiers, what might be done to improve the performance of the intelligence community, details of Jesus’s health care plan, or figures from his proposed budget. At night, often as we lay in bed, I’d fill her in on what I’d seen or read. It had become a kind of foreplay for us.
So on that morning, tired, worried, and afraid in this new way, I lay down on the bed, turned on the TV, and started going through the channels. Nothing much of substance at that hour. I’d been lying there for fifteen or twenty minutes when there was a knock on the door. I got up and opened it and saw my brother Stab. He had tears in his eyes. “Come on in, bro,” I said. “Let’s order some room service onion rings and coffee milkshakes and talk it out.”
American Savior Page 19
