by Steve Almond
“What?”
“You’re winning. You can afford the luxury of grace. But I’ll tell you what, if these undervotes ever get counted and Gore pulls ahead, you and the rest—”
“That will never happen,” Darcy said sharply. She smoothed her skirt with the heel of her palm and took a deep breath. “You know as well as I do that if the situation were reversed, Gore would do the same thing as Bush.”
“You may be right,” I said. “But if he did that, he’d be wrong. And I hope I’d have the integrity to see that.”
“And I don’t have integrity?”
“I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is …”
But what was I saying? Wasn’t I saying precisely that?
Darcy narrowed her eyes and waited for me to clarify myself.
“Look, I know you have a lot invested in Bush winning. You worked hard for him. And I realize we have different views on how to run things. I don’t want you to be a liberal. But I’m talking about the underlying principle. Democracy means you do your best to look at all the ballots. You try to find the truth.”
“Please, Billy. I came over here to talk about us.”
“This is about us,” I said. “We have to agree on the basic stuff. Truth. Fairness. I’m not talking about this damn election anymore. I don’t even care who wins. They’re both Republicans in my book. I’m talking about what you believe and what I believe.”
“Would you listen to yourself?” Darcy said. “This is just politics, Billy. Christ. You’re as bad as Gore.”
“Don’t reduce this to politics. Please. I want us to be able to agree here.” I wasn’t screaming exactly, but my voice kept throttling up because I could see where we were headed and it made my heart ache.
Darcy shook her head. “I knew this was a mistake. You don’t even know what day it is today, do you?” She was speaking softly now, as she did in the sylvan hours, when the ruckus of her life gave way to frank disappointments. This made me want to hold her, to wrap myself along the railing of her hip.
“A year ago, Billy. We met a year ago tonight.”
For a moment there it looked as if fairness might prevail. The Florida Supreme Court issued the ruling that should have come down in the beginning: recount the entire state, by hand. But then, of course, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in to rule that, well, something or other involving equal protection and, more obscurely, the Constitution, and anyway there certainly wasn’t enough time to clear this mess up—such a mess!—so, you know, don’t blame us, we’re only trying to help: Bush wins.
All over Washington, Republicans whooped it up. They’d managed to gain the White House and the only cost had been the integrity of every single civil institution in our country. What a bargain! I spent the evening swilling Jack and gingers, howling into Darcy’s various machines, imagining I could taste her. Our situation was unclear. By which I mean: she was no longer returning my calls. At around one in the morning I drove to her apartment.
“Go away,” she said, through the intercom. “You’re drunk.”
“I’m not drunk. I love you, honey. I wanna say sorry.”
“I’m not going to talk with you, Billy.”
“I don’t wanna talk about that. I promise. Buzz me in, honey. Please.”
She was wearing an old nightgown, the cotton soft and pilled. Her face was a little puffy. Now it was my turn to fall against her, to kiss her brow and plead. Her body stiffened.
“I was wrong,” I said. “I was a jerk. Nobody makes me feel like you. We fit, you know. Our bodies, we just fit.”
She rose onto the balls of her feet. But she didn’t push me away. “You’re too angry,” she said. “I don’t like it when you get so angry.”
I sank to my knees and hugged her waist. “I’m sorry. Something takes over. I start thinking too much.”
It is true that Darcy was a Republican. But she was still a woman, and as such susceptible to forgiveness. I pressed my cheek against her and breathed warm air into her belly. Her muscles slowly softened.
“No more thinking, Billy. No more arguing. It’s over now.” With just her fingertips, she hoisted the hem of her nightgown. The tiny blond hairs at the top of her thighs stood on end. My tongue took up the taste of laundry soap. A thick pink scent came from the hollow below.
Could I have known, as she climbed onto the bed and opened herself to me, as I kissed that softest skin, that my anger would rise once again? But who can know these things? They are products of the past, of history finding an apt disguise in the moment. I wanted only to give my beloved this pleasure, to be forgiven. Why, then, as her knees fell open, as her breath bottomed into rasps and her flesh began to pulse, could I think only of James Baker? He rose from the darkest region of my love, his tongue twisted like an old piece of steak. Loathing shimmered around him like an aura. Why was I thinking of this man while Darcy lay open before me like a blossom?
Perhaps because (it occurred to me darkly) Darcy did not view Baker as a bad man at all. She had described him as a righteous man, not unlike her grandpa Tuck. And now suddenly I imagined James Baker in the humble suit of a country preacher, presiding over my very own wedding.
Darcy was digging her fingers into the meat of my neck, murmuring go go go. Her body clenched. This was the life she wanted: a walloping orgasm and the sort of man who knew when to keep his mouth shut. I thought of my own parents, marching into the grim precincts of New Haven to register voters. They had done this. They had believed. My lips felt numb. I wasn’t entirely sure I could breathe. Up above, the shuddering began. Darcy’s thighs came together in a swirl. How I had loved this moment! The roar of the engines on the runway, the sudden flight. I closed my eyes and breathed in her body. But there was Baker again—and now he was winking at me.
I lifted my head.
Darcy’s hands pawed the air. Her mouth puffed my name.
“The Supreme Court,” I said, “has filed an emergency injunction.”
“No, Billy. Go. I’m close.” Darcy’s eyes were pinched. Her hands had slipped to her breasts, which she gently cupped. Her hip bones stood out like tiny knobs. What in God’s name was wrong with me?
“Billy. Come on. Not funny.”
I could feel my throat knotting up with sorrow.
Darcy lifted her head from the pillows. Her eyes were starting to clear. “What exactly are you doing here?”
“Once the High Court rules, there are no more appeals.”
Darcy drew back. “Do you have any idea how despicably you’re behaving? Oh Billy, you really are a sad case.” Darcy closed her legs and pulled a sheet across her chest, like a starlet. “The election is over. Don’t you get it? Over.”
“That’s not the issue,” I said quietly.
“The issue?” Darcy’s fists curled around the sheet. “Do you even know what the issue is anymore? The issue is us, okay? The issue is do you really love me. That’s the issue, Billy.”
Darcy waited for me to say something heroic. This seemed the thing to do, certainly, to renounce my stingy polemical heart, to affirm the primacy of love. What kind of liberal was I, anyway? And this is surely how it would have gone in the movies, where everything gets absolved in time for the credits. Though I loved Darcy, thrilled to the music of her body, stood in awe of her drive, I could not fathom how I was supposed to live with my disappointment in her.
Nor did I understand, exactly, how she could love me when she found my core beliefs naive and pitiable. Perhaps this was a uniquely Republican gift, the ability to ignore inconvenient contradictions. Or perhaps she was simply better at loving someone without judgment. All that matters is that I failed in that moment to tell her that I loved her.
“You should leave,” Darcy said quietly. Her voice floated down in the dark. “Get out of here, Billy. Don’t come back.”
My friends told me I’d made the right decision. They were extremely reasonable and full of shit. I knew the truth, which was that Darcy was the most exciting lover I would ever tak
e, because I always hated her a little, and never quite understood her, and because she forgave me this and loved me therefore more daringly, without relying on the congruence of our beliefs, the dull compliances of companionship.
I watched the inauguration simply to catch a glimpse of her. She was in the crowd beneath the podium. The camera caught her twice, a pretty woman with ruddy cheeks and a wide sad smile, gazing into the frozen rain.
Soon, she would rise to the office appointed by her talents and give her passion to another man. Eventually, she would move out to Bethesda or Arlington, where the stately oaks and pastures of blue grass survive. She would attach herself to the tasks of motherhood and governance with brilliant loyalty. And she would grow more achingly beautiful by the year, as our regrets inevitably do.
Washington was her town now. I understood that much. I lacked the guile, the gift for compromise, the ability to separate my wishes about the world from the cold facts of the place. I sat on my couch as the oaths were sworn and watched for Darcy’s yellow hair, which flickered in the wind that swept across the capitol and then was gone.
Pornography
When I was nineteen I saw two women fistfight on the street in Athens, Greece. The first thing I saw was the big one reach out and smack the little one across the face. She was hideous, the big one. Her face looked like a rusty shovel.
The little one, pretty and blond and slender, shrieked and tried to run. But the big one caught her by the blouse and jerked her back like a fish. The blond turned and swung ineptly, swung, as we used to like to say on the playground, like a girl, and the big one hit her, a blow which made her nose bleed. The big one smiled and cocked her arm and the blond, appearing to weep blood, shook her head and raised one arm and the big one hit her again and all of us, the men inside the cafe and on the sidewalk, turned from our backgammon boards and dishes of pasty chicken. We heard that damp solid sound and saw the blond fall in a heap and the big one bent to strike again.
But panic evinced some essential guile in the blond. She yanked her tormentor’s hair with a fury that seemed momentous and musical. The big one shrieked. Her great ungainly head went down first, followed by her body and her thick voice. The blond climbed to her feet. We assumed now that she would turn and run. But we had underestimated her. She was determined to exact revenge, not just of the hair-pulling variety but with sudden sharp kicks to the face, an effort to harp blood from the place where blood is most easily had.
Can I tell you there was something delicate in it all? Or that we men saw nothing of our own role? Or stepped in to put an end to the violence? No. Only that no one laughed, not the drunks pleading the doorways for sleep, nor the shop merchants clenching drachmae, nor the toothless backgammon king whose hand cupped the dice abstemiously. (And certainly not me. I merely stood trying to make sense of the damp buzz in my knuckles, the clench around my groin.)
The blond was wearing high-heeled boots. This seemed an absurd thing to wear in the midst of a street fight. But she was a beautiful girl, after all. She was not, presumably, a street fighter by trade. She kicked gracefully, but her balance was poor and the big one soon toppled her and clamped on to her, their movements close and ardent, and this intimacy we watched too, drawn to the hot puffs of air, the raked skin and grime taken up from the pavement.
A young policeman happened by and set his hand gently on the butt of his club. It pained him, I think, to imagine taking some significant role in the drama. But then the man at the center of it appeared suddenly, a meager man it must be said, with an oily toupee and cheap vinyl shoes, chopping his hands like a conductor, shouting uselessly and turning to us. He bent down and attempted to pry the big woman loose. He took hold under her arms and whispered in her ear. After a minute or so she released her grip and allowed herself to be borne up. In a gesture of chivalry abjectly unsuited to the moment, the man threw his coat over her tattered dress and hustled her from the scene.
There lay the blond after all this, her shirt torn off, her face a hideously tender swirl. The young policeman, rising to his duty reluctantly, helped her to her feet and led her slowly away, while we men in the crowd took in the flagrant unintended sway of her body, her pale lovely breasts streaked in blood, her legs showing nasty welts. We watched her in silence, watched her for as long as we could see her, sorely disappointed in ourselves, savoring this disappointment, waiting as shame forever waits to feel desire again.
The Body in Extremis
I had just moved from a small city to a big one. The small city had been no good for me. I found myself getting into extreme and ridiculous conflicts. The woman who considered me her protégé called me up drunk one night, hungry for flirtation, and grew furious when I didn’t reciprocate. I nearly came to blows with my landlord. People reacted to me somewhat too strongly. Frequently they would ask: “Are you from New York?”
The big city was better. The people dressed sharper and spoke quickly. They had a sense of distraction, which kept bullshit to a minimum. The theaters got all the movies. The buskers didn’t suck.
The night I left the small city, my friend Pam told me to look up her friend who had just moved to the big city. She showed me a photo, a half-profile shot, and from this photo I could see that Ling was Chinese and that she had nice legs. She was leaning back in a chair, smoking a cigarette. She looked to be assuming a posture of cool.
I thought: I would like to fuck her.
Whenever I see a photo of a desirable woman, even a reasonably desirable woman, even a woman not so especially desirable but in possession of one desirable quality, I think about fucking her. Sometimes I don’t even need a photo. Sometimes just a description, or a name, and I start to think: Yes, Monique, what would it be like with Monique? I think about fucking Jane Pauley. I think about fucking Princess Diana (or did). I thought once, briefly, about fucking Julia Child. Most men run women through this imaginative combine. If they are honest, they admit to these impulses. And if they are decent, they do not act on them.
My fantasies are rarely specific. Please don’t get that idea. I don’t see laced limbs or trembly snatch. I envision a more general sense. Could I convince her to have me? Run my fingers over her palest skin? What is she like naked? What sounds would she make? Like that. What would this be like, the intimacy, the security? Probably it has something to do with possession.
I’d come for the job, which involved teaching composition to eighteen-year-olds. I was thirty-four then. My friends were all married. Most had kids. I would call them on weekends and listen to the happy chaos in the background. I was a godfather three times.
I had started to pay inordinate attention to my hairline. There was some careful combing going on. Not a combover. Nothing that sad or drastic. But some combing down, to obscure a creeping widow’s peak. I would thumb through the fancy magazines and stare at the ads for stomach flatteners and heed their grave warnings about gut displacement. I knew this concept to exist. It had been some time since I was able to button my trousers without discomfort.
I did not do much socializing. This is one of my weaknesses. I have always been maladaptive when it comes to moving, though, oddly, I have moved eleven times since college. I’m not exactly sure how one meets people, if not through work. Bars and personal ads—no. These call for a marriage of bravado and innocence I can never swing.
About two weeks in, I called Ling. She had a deep voice, kind of mannish, which I hadn’t expected. She spoke quickly, with an air of nonchalance. She used various kinds of slang. She told me she was from San Francisco, but when I pressed the point she admitted that she had left there at six. She had grown up in Southern California—bingo, I thought—though she understood this to be a point of indictment, mitigated by the fact that she had gone to college and worked, briefly, in northern California. She was twenty-two years old.
Ling’s apartment was at the end of a small alley, on the top floor of an old house. The place smelled of wet carpet and rotting wood. It was cozy. Low ceiling, futon couch
, CDs in a milk crate, some fancy new appliances her mother had bought for her. Her features were broad and sort of gummy. Her nose looked like a lump of clay that had been flattened by someone’s thumb. Her ass, though, was impressively shelfed, not a trace of that flat Asian business. She wore thin corduroy pants and a top that made visible a band of skin along her lower back.
On the way to the movie we passed a young couple studded with piercings.
“I know a girl with vertical bars through her nipples,” Ling said.
“Bars?”
“They increase the sensation.”
“Wouldn’t you worry about them ripping?”
“I wouldn’t,” Ling said. “No.”
Ling was a grad student in mechanical engineering. She seemed determined not to let this dampen her self-image, which was that of a reprobate hipster. She was sexually frank. She smoked. She drank and talked excessively of drinking. She listened to bands with names like Pavement and Loaf, whose appeal was predicated on a desire not to express much effort. Behind this posed sangfroid, of course, was the inner panic nurtured by ambitious immigrant families. But Ling, an early grade skipper, learned how to get along among her elders—the necessary tamping of neurotic impulses. She was a hard worker who liked to appear careless. She worked hard at appearing careless.
My essential problem, a symptom, anyway, of my essential problem at that time, was that I had grown to crave sex, the release and congress, the awkward pungent business of bodies in extremis. Sexual ideation dominated my thoughts. I masturbated up to four times a day, and did so mainly to eliminate the distraction, so I could get my work done.
What I wanted was a body, a female body, lifted off its feet and set down again, an entirely new back and chest and ass and ribs. But I was uniquely unqualified to find one. I spent my days lecturing toothsome and pimpled teenagers and my evenings alone, grading papers, taking on the editing necessary to make adjunct work sustainable. And masturbating.
