Their conversations made Andy think of things she hadn’t thought of in years—her time in Kansas City, for example. Compared with Iowa, Kansas City was a strange world. The Halls where she worked was in the most elegant place she’d ever been at that point, a made-up town for shopping, a Fifth Avenue on the prairie (when she got to the real Fifth Avenue, she wasn’t very impressed, because the Country Club Plaza had spoiled her). Her boss at Halls had seemed imposing, too, all of thirty-one, possessed of his own apartment just north of the plaza, on the third floor! He was a sharp dresser, talked about jazz, and implied that he was close personal friends with Count Basie and Charlie Parker. What was his name? She thought for a morning, and over her tomato soup remembered—Martin Sock or Scott. She had been shy, not really carrying a torch for Frank, more like frozen up. She read a lot; that was where she learned all those stories that she’d told her various psychiatrists in the early years of their marriage, tales from a book of saga translations, and Giants in the Earth, The Emigrants, Kristin Lavransdatter, anything cruel and resonant in her mind with the Decorah/Albert Lea axis. But Martin took her out—sometimes to a movie, once to a club, once to dinner—and one of those times, not the last one, he took her to his apartment, into the bedroom, where he started fondling her. Fondling was not easy, given her armor of girdle and hosiery and bra and petticoat, not to mention the tight belt around her waist and the long zipper down her side and the hooks and their eyes. But he had been patient, and pretty soon she was half dressed on the bed with him, him still in his trousers and socks and neatly pressed shirt, and somehow he had his knee between her legs and he was pressing her and rubbing her, and at the same time kissing her, and something happened, there seemed to be an explosion where his leg was that seemed to burn through her body, making her shake and tremble and stiffen and cry out so that he smothered her face against his side. And then they were both so embarrassed that she jumped off the bed and put her clothes back on as best she could. She didn’t know what had happened to her, and he wasn’t saying. After she got back together with Frank, in preparation for their marriage, she found a book in a used-book store in Chicago by a woman named Ida Craddock, called Right Marital Living. She’d been amazed to discover that what had happened to her was fairly routine. She knew that if she told this to Frank, while lying softly in his arms in the dark in their very own bed in the house they had owned now for thirty-three years, he would be amused and affectionate and see it as an exchange for his tale of Corsica, but she couldn’t do it. She did wonder what had happened to Martin Sock. He would be almost eighty now.
—
GREECE WAS a place that people their age, Andy thought, could never understand why they had waited so long to get to. Certainly, standing on the uneven paving in front of the Parthenon, looking outward to the city beyond, Andy felt herself to have finally arrived at the apex of something, but not something so crass as civilization. Frank was good—he had been reading all summer. He supplied her with all sorts of information and helped her not to stumble, but he didn’t care if she asked questions (she didn’t), and he didn’t imply that if she’d paid more attention in school she would know who Socrates and Plato were. At Mycenae (but they pronounced it “Mikinna”), he stood with her at the gate into the city, the Lion Gate, where, after gazing at the carving of the two headless lions standing on their hind legs, facing a column, they marveled for quite a long time at the grooves in the paving, where there had been a rectangular stone in the portal, as wide as the space between the wheels of a chariot, to help the charioteers orient their vehicles so that they could get safely through the gate. These three-thousand-year-old ruts were the ghosts of uncountable momentary thoughts on the part of uncountable lost charioteers. As they walked up the hill from there, Frank told her a little about the Trojan War, the Achaeans (the Myceneans) and their friends and enemies. They followed a narrowing passageway and peered into one of the beehive tombs. The orange color of the local soil made the landscape seem especially abandoned. Mikinna, Andy thought, was much more haunting than the Acropolis, not white but brownish gold, as if the light of 1600 B.C. were cooler and duskier than that of 500 B.C. Olympia she found flat, busy, and boring, as if the labor of the gods had been, not great doings, but gossip, bookkeeping, and shipments here and there of olive oil and flax. Andy strolled along, looking at the ruins and the sky, taking in the fragrance of the vegetation. Although it was impossible to stay in Greece forever, she had the feeling that you could remain, lifetime after lifetime, floating here and there very quietly, and with plenty of company. She’d never felt this way about New Jersey or Iowa.
It was the assistant cook on the Flyboy, the yacht where they stayed for three nights, who said that, after they looked at Knossos and Agia Triada, they should not miss Delphi. It was out of the way, and Frank had planned to skip it, but since Andy had expressed no desires at all so far, he was eager to do whatever she so much as mentioned.
Almost October now. They got to Itea late in the afternoon, nearly dark, and decided to take a room in a regular hotel there, rather than continue up to Delphi. They ate in the dining room, spanakopita and roast lamb. Frank did an unusual thing—he took a glass of ouzo, and ordered Andy one, too. They sipped quietly, and she enjoyed the sharp anise flavor, but not, as it turned out, the tingle of the alcohol. Their two little glasses, half full, sat side by side on the table, and Frank said, “I miss the kids.”
He said this naturally, as if he had said it before, but he never had, at least to her. Andy almost said, “What kids?” but then she said, “Do you mean ‘miss,’ or ‘missed’?”
Frank looked at her, and then at the two little glasses. He said, “What’s the difference?”
There was a long silence, not uncongenial. If there was anything Andy knew, it was not to push something. Finally, Frank said, “I know that was a nightmare with Arthur, but I enjoyed getting to know—”
“Charlie.”
“He’s a little like Richie.”
No, thought Andy.
“Like Richie might have been,” he added.
Without us, thought Andy.
“Without Michael,” said Frank.
In the morning, they found their car and driver. The day was blustery and the sky gray. The landscape was steeper and more intimidating than they had seen before, and it put Andy in a dark mood—not sour, not irritable, but strangely Nordic (and that thought made her laugh). There were switchbacks and precipices, and it took half an hour to get to the town, which, at least today, did not seem like a sunny Mediterranean Greek town, even though the buildings were pleasantly white with tile roofs. Once at the shrine, they got out, left the driver, and started walking.
The Temple was built on a slope facing down a valley that ran between steep, dark, upthrusting mountains. A brochure they’d gotten said that the Greeks believed this was the navel of the world, and Andy could understand that. She did have the sense that everything else she had ever seen was peripheral to this spot, these ruins, this view. Here, the brochure said, the Earth goddess, Gaia, lived. As so often happens, a self-confident newcomer, a muscular, aspiring young man, made his way straight to this spot, and he killed the son of the goddess, possibly out of revenge, possibly just to demonstrate that a new world had come to pass. His name was Apollo, but it could have been anything, and once he had done the deed, he laid claim to the most central and the most intimidating location, the one most difficult to get to, the one with the greatest view. He then installed an old woman, not so different from Andy herself. The woman sat on her three-legged stool, inhaled the gases, and said her piece, and her words were taken as prophecy. For her efforts, she got to remain in this spot, to be cared for, to forget all the rest of the world. She also, Andy thought, came to perceive herself, every day, as smaller and smaller, a black hole at the center of the universe, a dot in time where time stood still.
They walked around the theater and the stadium and looked through the museum. She touched blocks of stone and rough stand
ing columns with her finger and appreciated that the Greeks allowed weeds and wildflowers to grow in every crevice, to give life to every vista. She stood quietly and felt the breeze, took off her sweater and let the particular Delphic sunlight brighten her arms. She thought of everyone in order—her father and mother and Sven (“Hyperboreans,” according to Frank’s book), then Frank, Joe, Lillian, Henry, Claire, Janet, Richie, Michael, Jared, Ivy, Loretta, Emily and Jonah, Leo, Chance, Tia, and Binky. She laid each thought of them upon the stones of the spot where the oracle was said to have been. She knew that the oracle had not prophesied only good fortune: many supplicants had been told of doom and despair, and as she breathed each name, Andy accepted that. But she suspected that the seer, in speaking, had always prophesied something meaningful—something that struck those who sought her, that stayed with them, that gave them, if not hope, then corporeality, the extra intensity of watching their own feet stepping away from the oracle, their own eyes gazing across the stadium, their own hands reaching up to push back their hair, which was tangling in the wind. Death might be worth that. Frank came up behind her and put his arm around her waist.
1994
THE FIRST TIME Ivy and Loretta had stopped speaking was the year before, when Ivy, Richie, and Leo were at Michael and Loretta’s place. The food was on their plates, Ivy was helping Leo with his fork, Chance was kicking Richie under the table (thinking, Richie knew, that he was kicking Tia), and Loretta said, with just a twitch of the eyebrows in Richie’s direction, “Can you believe that they kept the planes circling over LAX so that Bill Clinton could have a Beverly Hills haircut?” She tossed her head back and laughed what Richie considered a fake laugh, and Michael said, “He is ruthless. He’ll do anything.”
Ivy said, “No, I don’t believe it,” and there was nothing in her voice—she was preoccupied with Leo for the moment.
What she didn’t know was that Loretta had already taken Richie aside about “the health-care mess” in the kitchen, when all he was doing was having a look at the pork tenderloin she was making, and informed him that she considered his work on health care to be a bona-fide un-American activity. In his best I-am-your-congressman-and-am-happy-to-listen-to-your-views, he had said, “Why is that, Loretta?”
“If I want to move to Europe and wait in line to have my heart attack attended to, I will, but right now, right here, I want actual good health care.”
“Well, you can afford it,” said Richie.
“And why is that?” said Loretta.
And Richie did not say, Because your great-grandfather showed up in the right place and the right time and bought good land, well-located land, cheap from the Mexicans, who, by the way, had to vacate. He said, “I don’t know.” Just so he might hear what she had to say.
“Because Michael is an innovator and a thinker. He’s made his way by being smart and ahead of the game. Who realized that stocks were finished and bonds were the way to go? Michael. Who now has his own trading operation when no one had the balls to try it before? Michael.”
Richie had known that Michael was casting about for something riskier to do, but he hadn’t known the result. He filed away this bit of information, but he said, “So everyone else should suffer and die?”
“Don’t be so aggressive,” said Loretta, stirring the polenta. “It’s not becoming.”
And Richie backed down, the way Congressman Scheuer advised him to do, saying, “Now, this is how you do it: you listen, you nod, you maintain your focus, and you recognize that many of your colleagues are crazy or dumb. You are the tortoise, you are the bulldog. You keep holding on and you will win, but don’t go at them. That way, you kill yourself in the end.” Of course, Congressman Scheuer had also advised him to get himself onto the committee that was working on health care, a “can’t lose” way to start his political career, and he had said that campaigns were wild and sometimes vicious but that after the election everyone accepted that those who won, won, and they got down to business. It had taken Richie two months to realize that those were the old days, the old days of 1990, and those days were already gone.
And so they started eating, and then Ivy said, “That item of bullshit was made up by Bill Kristol and parroted by the L.A. Times, same as Travelgate, same as the idea that Hillary is simultaneously a controlling superhuman bitch and an incompetent hag,” and it was her tone, mocking and self-confident, that propelled Loretta from her chair into her bedroom, while Tia said, “What’s wrong with Mom?” and Ivy said, “What’s going on?”
Michael said, “She hates the Clintons. We were at a party last week and someone said she thought they were a breath of fresh air in Washington at last, and Loretta threw a bowl of chips in the woman’s face.”
After that, no invitations or phone calls for two weeks; then the two women had lunch and agreed not to talk politics.
The second time they stopped speaking came in the summer, around the death of Vince Foster, a decent guy who had come with the Clintons from Arkansas and had not been able to handle politics in Washington—and how could he? Richie thought. Loretta went straight from the discovery of the body to convicting the Clintons of murder in less than a day, and in fact told Ivy that her mother, in California, had proof that hired goons from New York City had done it, people so experienced in getting rid of potential truth-tellers that they had murdered hundreds of law-abiding Republicans over the years. Ivy laughed so hard that Loretta hung up on her, and that silence lasted a month.
Richie found the death of Vince Foster, whatever the circumstances, uniquely eerie because he had been driving through McLean the evening before the body was discovered. He had gone out of his way to drive past Uncle Arthur and Aunt Lillian’s old place, noticed that it was repainted and updated, and then started thinking about what Uncle Arthur might know about various things, and then he started wondering about his dad and Uncle Arthur, what sort of friends they had always been, and what did they know about one another that they would never reveal. The whole idea made him feel a little dizzy, so he pulled to the side of the road for a few minutes, admittedly not at Fort Marcy Park, where the body was found the next day, but near there—he would not have been an eyewitness to anything—but when the discovery of the body appeared in the papers, he found himself confusing the two mysteries and deciding that, no matter what, he would never live in McLean.
When Richie brought this up with his mom, she had said, “Your uncle Arthur is a tragic figure, but your father is not,” in her usual distracted voice. Was that Andy’s way of not taking sides? He knew that she considered him a tattletale, always had as long as he could remember, but he considered himself a genuinely confused person. The same thing was true in Congress—he was genuinely confused. It was not like the old days in Brooklyn, talking to this person and that person about the congressman and his associates and enemies; in New York, everyone had been blunt about their motives. In Washington, he had discovered, you never knew. There was one senator, and a famous one, who kept on his staff a certain chatty young woman who was from a certain state. Whenever the senator needed help from the equally famous but very different senator from that other state, he would send the young woman to “gossip him down,” which meant that she would get him in a good mood by talking about all of their mutual acquaintances, and not leave until she got a promise that he would help her boss on something or other. The entire building, all the buildings, the Capitol and the office buildings, buzzed with hidden agendas, and it took years to learn all the languages that were spoken. Some congressmen hated to be interrupted, for example—they saw it as a sign of disrespect. Others expected to be interrupted—if you didn’t interrupt, you weren’t paying attention (Congressman Scheuer had been like this). For just these reasons, Riley Calhoun was not a good staffer. She would argue vehemently about the greenhouse effect even with those who agreed with her—no one was ever as worried about the greenhouse effect as they should be (though now Riley said he was to call it “global warming”). Was insistence a Wisconsin
trait? But Riley was a dynamite researcher, so Richie more or less paid her a legislative assistant’s salary to keep quiet and keep investigating. He also got himself on the Energy and Commerce Committee, and for that he had to thank her, since his real first choice had been Foreign Affairs, and if he were on that committee, he would have to have an opinion about Bosnia and Serbia right now. He was glad that he didn’t have to take responsibility for anything other than funding solar initiatives and counteracting the greenhouse effect.
His office had been running smoothly for almost a year. His “spokesmodel,” as she called herself, or “communications director,” named Geneva Nicoletti, was from Greenwich Village but dressed like she was from Cleveland, always wore a belt that showed off her narrow waist, and never stopped smiling. Richie liked both Riley and Geneva. They were in their twenties and seemed to accept the strange idea that he knew what he was talking about. Two people that he suspected knew that he did not know what he was talking about were Marion, his chief of staff, who had worked for Congressman Scheuer, and Lucille, his scheduler, who had been the congressman’s scheduler. She was black. She owned a house in D.C., and liked working for congressmen, though she’d been disappointed to move from Rayburn, where the congressman had his office (“I am the congressman!” thought Richie, every time Lucille referred to Congressman Scheuer as “the congressman”) to Cannon, much tighter quarters. Richie expected Lucille to take immediate advantage of the next congressional heart attack if that congressman happened to have an office in Rayburn. Italian, black, Native American, Hispanic (Marion’s assistant’s parents were from Cuba)—Richie privately thought of his staff as a Rainbow Coalition that legitimized his election every single day.
He had also found that he didn’t mind staying in Washington during the week and coming home on weekends. His apartment in Washington was a one-bedroom in the basement of a townhouse, with a futon, a TV, and a toaster oven, within biking distance of the Capitol building, and not only did he enjoy biking, but he wore a helmet and encouraged photographers from newspapers to take pictures of him standing beside his trusty Dahon. He was not, at forty-one, the youngest congressman, but he didn’t mind looking like he was. The apartment was bracingly basic, and the more basic it stayed, the more he didn’t have to share it with anyone or invite anyone over.